News Rivva: Germany's TechMeme

Rivva – Germany’s first memetracker – recently released its first English vertical, time to take a closer look:

While Germany caused some news recently for generating quite some copycat energy (yep, we’ve got a dozen Twitter clones), Rivva is a brilliant example of how to respectfully adapt and culturally sensitively reinterpret an existing idea.

Like its inspiration Techmeme (the name Rivva signifies upon river of news but also pays tribute to Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera) Rivva scans a selected and growing subset of German blogs, extracts and reaggregates the most interesting stories as the zeitgeist of the day.

Rivva was developed by Frank Westphal while taking a sabbatical year after being the technical lead of Qype in 2006 and is still very much a work in progress. New features or views are constantly being added:

The News River lists all stories chronologically and is updated as new stories come in. All stories are archived as well which makes it a great way to catch up or to track a topic as it evolves in time.

Rivva mobile is optimised for mobile devices.

Rails Rivva is a new vertical of Rivva focusing on Ruby on Rails in English.

Company blog: Blog

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)