We're excited to announce Baristanet's launch of our NewsCloud Facebook technology:
Why visit? What can you get at Baristanet Community that you couldn’t get on Baristanet? For one, it’s much less curated. Baristanet Community grabs our RSS feed with our latest headlines, but you can post stories there too, either grabbed from other news sources or written by yourself.
You can ask questions of your fellow Baristaville denizens — as I did in the small test with a handful of users we conducted over the last few days. Already I’ve gotten names of a handyman and an upholsterer.
There are also forums. And here’s a big difference between this application and other online forums, or even our regular Baristanet conversations, these are forums without anonymity. Because everybody who participates is already a Facebook member, they’re using real names. We think this could make for a lively conversation that’s perhaps a little more polite than the usual online fray.
Visit the site on Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/baristanet or on the Web: http://facebook.baristanet.com.
Our collaboration with Baristanet has been funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation since December 2009 as part of a larger project to launch Facebook sites for news organizations.
As all Knight-funded projects are open source, you can download the code or learn more about our efforts at http://opensource.newscloud.com. We also recommend you follow @newscloud on twitter.
Learn more about the Boston Globe's recent soft-launch of our Facebook technology.
