Today, the Washington Post Company launched Trove, its “free news-aggregation website” which pulls from “more than 10,000 news sources” and cost the company ten million dollars to put together. Post Co. chief digital officer Vijay Ravindran told the AP that Trove is “a first stop for news and a step toward understanding what the future of news looks like online.” So does it deliver on the hype? Uh, not exactly.
After allowing the service to access information via your Facebook account — including, but not limited to, your name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, likes, music, TV, movies, books, quotes, activities, interests, birthday, hometown, current city and any other information you’ve shared with everyone — and agree to allow Trove to send you email, you’re ready to roll. What do you get in exchange for granting the Washington Post Company access to all that data? Not that much, unless, of course, you spend all day updating your Facebook or like reading news related to a group you joined several years ago and then forgot about. (For example, this editor now has a Trove “channel” exclusively dedicated to Southwest Airlines. Yippee.)
For those of us who are somewhat less obsessive about Facebook maintenance, there is an option to search for news topics which you can add to your account’s “channels.” But the search is incredibly hit or miss. (Mostly the latter.) Take, for example, a search for “dc politics.” On the plus side, that search will deliver stories from a diverse group of sources like the Post (duh), Washington City Paper, and even neighborhood blogs like The Georgetown Dish 14th and You. But of the returned reports, only half were published in the last 24 hours — and the query includes a City Paper post from April 11 asking readers what it should ask participants it its candidate forum, which took place eight days ago. Timely!
(In a welcome letter to Trove users, Post Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Don Graham claimed that “editors are constantly working to inject the latest news onto the site’s home page and into channels of information that users can choose to follow.” It appears that they need to work a little bit harder.)
The most offensive part of Trove? When a report opens inside Trove, it is for some reason stripped of all links. Take for example Mike DeBonis’ morning local politics roundup, which normally contains dozens of links to both WaPo and non-WaPo sources. But in the Trove version of DeBonis’ roundup, there isn’t a single link to be clicked, which pretty much defeats the purpose of a news aggregation service.
And to think: the advertisements haven’t even kicked in yet.
