I wonder if personalized news has that much appeal, really. Part of the success of traditional tv, radio and newspapers is the shared experience with some group you identify with.
Incidentally, this is why I read news.YC also, it's fascinating to read what smart people have to say after they have been exposed to the same stimulus like you. With traditional media, this discussion was in the pubs or the workplace the day after.
Traditional media is not necessarily dying because the stories are not interesting, well that's the symptom, but the cause is maybe that the group is not one that you feel you belong to anymore, and the content is taylored to the mean of that group anyway.
The product seems like a shiny interface to a personalized Google News, which as you say is just not very interesting.
A word to aspiring news startups: journalism is old and sophisticated - try learning something about it instead of pretending it is a data clustering or personalization problem.
Yes! You put it very well. I've felt this for a while but not been able to get it down like you have.
I'm usually on the "cutting edge" when it comes to things online, new technology, apps, and so forth, but no "personalized news" service has ever stuck with me. It "feels" wrong and I can't put my finger on why. I prefer to just subscribe to a handful of trusted sources and let a human (or many humans, in the case of HN or Reddit) curate what I'll be seeing.
I believe, however, that better querying is going to become a big deal and could become a good way to have "personalized" news but without all of the AI and guessing games that seem to take place with clever new personalized news services.
Part of the success of traditional tv, radio and newspapers is the shared experience with some group you identify with.
Perhaps, but most of the reason for the success of traditional tv, radio, and newspapers is that, until the last five years or so, there weren't really any viable alternatives. Only recently has content distribution become a non-issue; previously, it was a bottleneck.
The thing about technological progress is that the replacement is never just "the old thing, only on computers". When people in the 90s wrote about the Internet and the Digital Library, quite a lot of them were envisioning something like Google Books, which is just a collection of books, only online! What actually happened was Wikipedia. (And a lot of other stuff, all of which further proves my point, but Wikipedia is sufficient.) Nobody in the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming. The Digital Library wasn't just the analog library writ large, it was something new that an analog library could never do.
Digital newspapers already exist. They are fed by RSS/Atom and do a variety of exciting things. Adding a top layer of formatting driven by a computer to make Google Reader (or your favorite RSS/Atom consumer) look like a old-style paper newspaper is a waste of time, and even worse, a waste of valuable screen space. Especially if you're going to try to write an algorithm to automatically figure out what the "top story" is, which will never be as good as a human. (And as in the first paragraph, there's also a variety of other things, like Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and all kinds of further digital elaborations on the fundamental newspaper template as modified by what digital makes easy and/or possible.)
Trying to replicate the old analog way of doing things is just silly.
Nobody in the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming
Tim Berners-Lee mentioned "General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc." as the first area for intended uses of hypertext, see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html He also mentioned collaborative authoring. The innovation of Wikipedia is public editing which made sense when the general population came online.
I don’t necessarily want to disagree with you, just mention that there are examples were the new thing was the old thing, only on computers. One would be digital photography. Sure, photography got a lot faster but it’s basically still the same thing. Changes have been slow and only recently began to have an impact.
And I don’t think Canon or Nikon did anything wrong. I think that it was probably correct to understand digital photography as analog photography – only on computers – first and look which places you can go only after you executed that perfectly.
The point is not that there isn't a point of overlap, the point is that the digital world can go many more places. Every digital camera I've ever bought has come with photo manipulation software that may include various physically-inspired tools, but also goes above and beyond what can be done in analog. Any company that tried to be just "analog photos, but on computers" would be stomped in the marketplace. I have found digital photography to be a qualitatively different experience than analog photography for over a decade now.
(Which isn't to say the digital experience is all pros and no cons; photography has held on to some "pros" longer than many other fields.)
>>and thus "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry".
Language like this generally makes me more skeptical that they'll accomplish this
It is one thing to blog or to aggregate "news", it is another to actually investigate and report the news. I don't know if they realize this, when they talk about delivering the "final blow to the newspaper industry"
>>The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article and add the hashtag #freeapollo (ha ha, retweet bots!) are getting a promotion code for the app on iTunes.
Their 1.0 version launched today. Apple only gives you 50 promo codes for an app version. I wonder whether they really have some way to hand out 100 promo codes today or whether this is just going to be their first case of over-promising and under-delivering.
News is a funny market. If you say to someone "we'll help you find interesting or relevant news articles" they'll shrug and say it isn't a problem. Keeping informed as to what is happening in the world is a solved problem - by editors.
And whilst the current solutions (eg: everyone sees the same content on BBC) aren't perfect they're good enough and this is a tough product to justify to users.
Additionally, changing habits is really really hard. People habitually load nytimes.com every lunch time to see what is happening in the world - and you expect to shift that habit - for a marginal improvement in life? The brand loyalty with publications is ridiculously strong, not only do I trust The Financial Times, I hate the alternatives. "You just called me a Daily Mail reader? I am literally offended."
A lot of people insist that RSS Readers are too complex, and juggling multiple sources without an RSS Reader is too hard. That's true, but in reality most people don't care. If you think about it - people use different destinations for just about everything, so it's tough to imagine why this should be consolidated.
Another small problem with this market is that algorithm aggregators become over tuned. You read six articles about BP and suddenly your newspaper is less of the brilliant news paper and more of a BP quarterly earnings report. So then you down vote a few articles and then you miss the next BP scandal a few months later.
Also with this product - I'm expected to "thumb up" interesting news articles, this hurts emotionally if I'm "thumb up-ing" a news article about six 21 year old american soldiers being limbless in Iraq. "Show me more like this?" I think not.
I think there is significant value in topic communities and curation, an example of this is the Reddit Subreddits, if you want to stay informed in Venture Capital, in Golf, or in MotoGP it's quite hard to scratch that itch and always find cool new content (eg: a few articles a day)
Ask yourself: How would you find up to date content about Fashion? Or Coeliac Disease? Or Graphic Design.
I think news needs a fundamental shift towards social consumption, I think Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook have incrementally shifted this towards a social experience - which is exactly what news is about, it isn't about "being informed" per se, it's about "being informed amongst your friends" people want to look like they are in tap with what is happening in the world, and do not like having to ask their friends what they missed.
I can't say I understand why some people would consider RSS feeds to be too complex. There really are only two operations that you have to know how to do:
1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss button in the url bar.)
2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page full of articles.
Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it comes down to it, the system is incredibly simple. Far simpler than visiting a every site to find updated articles...
RSS readers suck. I've signed up for a abandoned Google Reader at least three times. Here's why:
1. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow.
2. Adding all these into Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying.
3. Once I add them in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts.
4. Suddenly I'm faced with two things:
a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal with.
b. A generic, plain, boring interface in which Gizmodo articles, Slate articles, NYTimes articles....all look exactly the same, as if they'd been published by...Google.
I hate both of these things. I don't need another guilt box nagging me to do stuff all the time. And I don't know why I'd want to reduce all the lovely web sites I enjoy reading into a single, generic, designed-by-Google design. Variety is the spice of life. I'd rather just click on my bookmarks, actually go to the sites when I want to read stuff from them, and let the publishers get some ad views in the process.
Hm. I guess that's why you and I differ. I carefully trim my RSS feed so that I have, at most, 100 items a day to read. Any more than that and it feels like too much of a chore to slog through all of them. However, with only 100 items I feel like its a manageable level of content for the day. I also tend to keep my rss feeds limited to low-frequency feeds. I find it especially nice for feeds that update once a day. I then don't have to keep checking back at the site to see if it's updated yet. Sites like Ars Technica that have high volume, I still prefer to read from the site itself. Then I can avoid the pain of having my feeds filled with hundreds of unnecessary articles.
However, the most important reason why I like using rss is for blogs that I stumble across that I like, but that I don't have the memory to keep all the urls in my head, or the time to spend flipping through all of them to see if they've updated. Let me give you an example: I subscribed a few months ago to a blog that was effectively dead. The author hadn't posted for about a year. Just yesterday in my blog feed, I saw that he had made a new post. I would have completely missed his post if not for the fact that I had his feed in my rss reader.
I completely understand your point about google stripping the formatting out of posts, and it annoys me sometimes too, but for the most part I tend to value content over nice css.
EDIT: I'd like to head off any comments I get about the "memorizing urls" comment I made. I find myself on a lot of different computers, and "bookmarking" a site through adding its rss feed to google reader is a lot easier for me than it is to deal with syncing bookmarks. Not to mention that my bookmarks have become an untamed jungle over time. I only venture into them when I am not looking for anything in particular. For most everything I use the autocompletion on the url bar.
I share this sentiment towards RSS readers to some extent. I've done a similar signup-giveup dance with Google Reader several times. It is all the work it adds to my day that I dislike. I've tried desktop RSS readers too, with the same result. It gets harder to go back after a while too - I can almost feel the stress increase when I am trying to use an RSS reader again.
I've often felt that something like the "River of News"[1] notion that Dave Winer likes to talk about would work really well, I wonder if there are any public services that behave in that manner.
The basic idea is:
1) No read/unread counts.
2) No bold-ing/un-bolding of stuff I have or have not read.
3) No emphasis on grouping by site - should work out of the box as a single stream of posts to any of the sites I am interested in.
4) Subscribe via single-click bookmarklet, ala Instapaper's Read Later bookmarklet.
I do admit, having high unread counts ticks me off. I wouldn't mind seeing that go. but I try to keep my feeds small so I only get a small stream of content that is all important to me, instead of a firehose of worthless stuff.
Beyond "RSS readers suck", basically reading on a computer sucks. I can't do it for more than about 10 minutes without needing to rest my eyes. On the other hand I can sit and peruse the Sunday paper for an hour or more and not have any such feeling. I can get absorbed in a novel and read without a break for half the day. That's NEVER happened looking at a computer display.
This endeavor relies on a healthy ecosystem of news. This product is a recommendation system, a glorified web browser--not a newspaper. And it's insane to think that destroying the newspaper business is in these founders' best interest, if indeed they wish to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry." The arrogance and short-sightedness of the statement is thick.
I will never understand so many technical folks' glee in watching the decline of investigative reporting, media companies, publishing houses, and so on--especially when so many applications like this simply exploit the work of others, add a layer of abstraction on top. ("Exploit" being non-pejorative, simply descriptive.)
The future of news, as I see it: traditional media mostly dies, leaving a giant vacuum that part-time enthusiasts can't fill. People don't know what their local and regional government is up to because research is mostly boring, and who wants to do boring stuff for free? Corruption increases until investigative media outlets rise up to do full-time research and exposure. Frustrated citizens value this enough to pay for it. Paid-for media rises again, albeit in new forms, supplemented by volunteers.
In other words, the pendulum will swing back and forth as fickle humans change their mind, just like in politics and most other things in human history.
Your statements appear to be based on the idea that traditional media is telling us what "local and regional government is up to". While this is true in a sense, they leave out what our local and regional governments are actually up to. ESPECIALLY when it comes to actual corrupting influence and the effects. I see independent journalists as more willing to confront that.
Current media gives us certain facts and certain angles, but there is too much left unsaid, untouched, analyzed, due to their corporate policies and the nature of the establishment. The relationship between politics, industry, media corporations and the government has become much too overlapping and incestuous for my comfort.
TV news appears to still be profitable -- even CNN is making a profit. Newspapers should be profitable too, albeit a drastically reduced number of 'em.
Does anyone know if there are amateur news sites that do things like collect shit people just report like "oh shit, this guy just got hit by a car on Damen & Wolcott" or "Hey, guys, the regime is cracking down on our protest", or has Twitter somehow filled in that gap?
>modal dialog: "Are you sure you wanted to push that button? No / Yes"
/pushes yes.
/pushes another button
>modal dialog: "You pushed that button you pushed!"
/pushes ok.
Yep, I'm really seeing the Bing/Microsoft side of the application's design. I wonder if it asks if you want to launch the application when you launch the application?
I find it particularly ironic that the yes/no dialog comes up on the button with the greatest amount of error-room, while the one that just says "yaay!" has essentially the least. Apparently they're not a fan of Fitts' Law or its ramifications; they just put the double-check cost on the hardest button to miss, and the "congrats" on the one easiest to miss.
Sounds like they have an extremely talented tech team. I'm not sure I find what they are doing to be particularly groundbreaking or interesting, though.
There has never been and never will be a computer algorithm that can take the place of a good editor. Period, cannot be done but it won't stop the clueless from trying.
For example I may not wish to ever see stories about say Britnney Spears but I guarantee if she dies from an overdose tomorrow I will want to know it.
Nice to know the problem of content overflow is being solved intelligently.
Haven't spent time finding out it this exists already, but would love to have sometime which lets me follow a news item over a time period, like a story unfolding everyday and I could track it from its beginning and analyse like a detective :P
Any ideas what they are doing in their source of their homepage with G-analytics JS written 4 times in a row? Then also it seems 2 more times at the bottom; Is that A/B testing or are they pumping numbers>? (and surely pumping numbers this way wouldnt work)
Incidentally, this is why I read news.YC also, it's fascinating to read what smart people have to say after they have been exposed to the same stimulus like you. With traditional media, this discussion was in the pubs or the workplace the day after.
Traditional media is not necessarily dying because the stories are not interesting, well that's the symptom, but the cause is maybe that the group is not one that you feel you belong to anymore, and the content is taylored to the mean of that group anyway.