Yesterday, the Washington Square News officially launched the beta version of nyu.pulse — a new website that will allow you to share news in real time with the NYU community. When something happens on campus, post it on nyupulse.com, where others can respond and interact with the news. If there's a question about NYU you want answered, you can post it straight to the feed and use the collective knowledge of 60,000 students and faculty as a resource.
You may notice that Pulse looks a lot like Twitter — users can post short "reports" or questions which show up in a school-wide, chronological feed.
But I hope that as we get closer to the official launch this fall, the ways in which this site is different from Twitter will become clear. In addition to letting you post comments and "details" (short, secondary facts) to reports, Pulse allows you to edit facts that other people submit. So if you see a submission that's inaccurate or awkwardly phrased, you can change it yourself for everyone to see immediately.
Pulse isn't meant to be your only destination for news. Instead, my hope is that it will become a site that floats on the surface of the sources you already use — that gets you news in the quickest, most accurate way possible before handing you off to more in-depth coverage elsewhere. Eventually, Pulse could become a central repository for NYU's news — a granular history of our community, licensed under the Creative Commons for anyone to use and remix.
For now, though, we're a fledgling beta site that needs your help in trying it out. Everything may not work perfectly yet, and the site that launches in September will likely look very different from the one now online. But with your help, and countless revisions in the months ahead, I hope we can build something useful for the NYU community.
So take a minute, sign up for an account and tell us your news. There's no telling where we'll go from here.
