Ping.it: Not a Google Reader replacement, but a tool to discover emerging viral content. Want to know which YouTube (s GOOG) videos were most popular on Reddit? Or what the top stories are across 10 different news sites? Ping.it aims to help with a new web tool that lets users create custom “probes” to surface specific content across the web. Ping.it, an Oslo, Norway-based startup, has been around since 2009 and has experimented with a number of business models, but it launched in public beta this week as a content discovery service. Ping.it’s main feature is “probes,” which it describes on its blog as “small apps which go out and retrieve information from across the Web on behalf of the user.
They can be created, edited, shared and subscribed to – all by Ping.it users.” “I see Ping.it as a new step forward in content discovery using elements from traditional RSS Readers and social media,” founder Marius Lian told me. Here are a few of the probes that users have created already: Users can subscribe to existing probes or create their own.
Pulse continues its social push with Highlights, a selective feed of news stories from Facebook. Pulse has rolled out a new feature today for its digital news aggregation app called Highlights, which pulls in a selective feed of news stories shared by your friends and family on Facebook. Pulse, similar to Flipboard and Circa, is an Android, iOS and Web app that grabs your favorite news and media websites, bundles them together and then presents them in a clear, readable format. As a news consumption service it works very well, but it’s always been a solitary affair relying mostly on Pulse’s own opinion of what’s worth reading.
Earlier this month, however, the company added social integration with Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr and Facebook accounts, reeling in uploaded content shared by friends or followers. This content was formatted specifically for Pulse, with a redesigned article layout for photos and videos. Highlights is an entirely new area, available by swiping to the right from the home screen, that shows stories shared only by your friends on Facebook. Silobreaker. Clipped's Natural Language Processing Helps Service Take On Flipboard. Finding ways to keep track of what’s happening in the world and in various markets can be pretty difficult, especially on mobile devices. People are interested in seeking out new ways to allow them to get information that’s relevant and important to them. Apps to help with this problem include Flipboard, a popular social news aggregator that has helped to change the way people consume content, Zite, Cir.ca, and Summly.
Now, Clipped is seeking to take its place as one of those services and has launched its iOS and Android apps to help optimize the way people consume the news on their mobile devices. An alumni of the Teens in Tech incubator, Clipped says that it delivers top news content in the form of bullet point summaries that it believes will “save users time and energy.” Its app also includes a summarized search engine that allows users to “read summaries about exactly what they want.” Abridged version of Flipboard Some may think that Clipped is similar to Summly, but Tandon disagrees. How Do Millennials Like to Read the News? Very Much Like Their Grandparents - Derek Thompson. Attention publishers: For all the attention given to "bold rich multi-media experiences," young mobile news readers still prefer stories the way their great-great-grandparents did: In columns of text.
Reuters In the eyes of employers, marketers, and brand gurus, Generation Y tends to be treated like a separate species, forged in the primordial stew of Internet, whose habits are so positively alien to the rest of the country that they've inspired a cottage industry: The How-Do-You-Solve-a-Problem-Like-Millennials? Genre. But a new report from the Pew Research Center (pdf) suggests that, when it comes to reading the news on mobile devices, young people aren't so different. First, they use their tablets and smartphones to read the news at nearly identical rates to 30- and 40-somethings. There are some small differences. Men are more likely to read longer articles. Here's another surprise. Blogging with Medium, the odd new product from Twitter's founders. Blogging was once heralded as a great equalizer, seizing power from big media gatekeepers and redistributing it to the common internet user.
But these days, super-posters are sucking up much of the oxygen — look at tastemaker Jason Kottke, snarky culture writer Carles of Hipster Runoff, and marketer Seth Godin, who shows up on the first page of a Google search for "blog. " It's an intimidating scene for a newbie blogger. Medium, the new self-publishing platform from two of Twitter's co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, promises to eliminate the need for bloggers to also be marketers.
"We want to help the best ideas and stories have the biggest possible impact," Williams said in an email. "For the vast majority of people, Medium will have a higher return-on-investment for writing than publishing one's own blog. " The core idea is that regular people want to consume content published by other regular people. There’s no hard evidence of demand for what Medium offers "It's all creativity. Big-name investors throw $15M at news aggregation startup Prismatic. Ever heard of Prismatic? Until yesterday, neither had we. But founder Bradford Cross wouldn’t stop pinging our collective inbox about his company’s latest news, which turned out to be a $15 million round of funding from none other than überinvestor Yuri Milner and Accel partner Jim Breyer. Prismatic is a news aggregation application. On the surface, it looks a lot like Flipboard or Circa or a nicely tarted-up version of Digg or StumbleUpon or Reddit.
So what makes it special enough for such a giant first round of institutional funding? The team previously took a small $1.2 million seed around about a year and a half ago. On that, they were able to build an iPhone app as well as a web interface for a core service: finding, reading, sharing, recommending, and saving news items and articles from around the web. Cross told VentureBeat that one of Prismatic’s big differentiators is that it will have more staying power than its competitors. Here’s a look at the app: Twitter is pivoting. Peter Chernin had this to say during his days as President of News Corp, owners of MySpace, in 2006: If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace… Given that most of their traffic comes from us, if we build adequate if not superior competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them.
This was the justification and mentality that MySpace employed as they blocked various fast-growing platform partners that they felt impinged in MySpace’s core user experience. Any of this sound familiar? Yesterday, Peter Chernin was named to the Twitter board of directors. Here was the text of his announcement tweet: @twitter I’ve been a long-time user of twitter for news and information.
Interesting things about Peter Chernin’s announcement It is apparently his first tweet ever(!) The fork in the road. Summly wants to make news summaries cool. Remember Nick D’Aloisio, the Internet wunderkind I met last year in Berlin? Well, he is back with Summly, an iOS (iPhone + iPod Touch) mobile app that takes full news pages and offers them as short and succinct summaries for on-the-go consumption.
The app, which is likely to be available at the iTunes app store later today, is well-designed, relatively simple and easy to use. But more on that later. All Grown Up When I met him last year, the company he had started while still at school was just him. Investors, frankly, don’t mean anything unless there is a product and a market opportunity that is validated by target customers. The company has grown from Nick (who has taken a leave of absence from school) to seven people in addition to about half a dozen people at SRI who have helped develop the technology platform for the new, improved news-focused app.
My Tiny App Review There is a lot to like about the app: it is simple, initiative, fast, clean and extremely well designed. Undrip Takes All The Nonsense Out Of Your Social Feeds. If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re pretty well connected, at least in terms of your various social networks. But it can be overwhelming: there’s Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram. And those are just the major leaguers. But Undrip, which has just launched out of private beta on our Disrupt stage, is ready to clear out all of the clutter to show you the very best of what’s in your social feeds. Undrip is an iOS app that pulls in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Path, Pinterest (and the list goes on…) into one interface.
But it doesn’t show you everything: no status updates, no checkins and no FarmVille updates. It follows your social behavior and filters out all of the useless noise. The app lets you perform all the same actions as if you were on Facebook or Twitter, such as “likes,” retweets, etc. The company has raised a total of $850,000 thus far, and the app is available now for free in the App Store. MA: What’s your distribution plan? Why Circa Is Hoping It Can Inspire Change In The Way We Consume News. The way people are consuming news has been changing with the introduction of newer technology like the iPhone, iPad, and other smart devices. No longer are people needing to go to their familiar news stand to pick up the latest edition of the Washington Post, New York Times, or Financial Times. Instead, we’re turning to more portable devices that will display the news to us in real-time and more frequently than what we’d get through traditional means.
A recent Pew Internet study affirms this theory that the news landscape is indeed changing. Nothing is safe from the digital age, not even television. Another Pew Internet study shows that over half of all U.S. adults are using the Internet through their smartphone or tablet and 64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners indicated that they use their devices to consumer news at least weekly. That’s why I Can Haz Cheezburger founder Ben Huh felt that a solution needed to be put together. Image credit: European Parliament/Flickr. Circa’s New iOS App Will Change The Way You Consume News. The way that we consume information on the Internet has changed dramatically over the years.
The main reason is because there is simply more content available to us than we could ever consume during our time on Earth. Back in the day, our only options for news were newspapers and then eventually the local TV or radio station telling us what’s happening in our immediate area. Circa has launched its iOS app today, and it aims to change the way that we consume and retain information. It’s a drastic approach, but it’s one that could actually work. We told you about Circa back in April, when all we knew was that the company had an impressive list of investors, and that its CEO and co-founder Matt Galligan, formerly of SimpleGeo, had big aspirations: We’re trying to make it so that people educate themselves for 5 minutes as opposed to play Angry Birds.
Does Circa bring something new and awesome to the table? Say Hi To Circa We too are excited! The more I use the app, the more helpful it becomes. Bing Now Handpicks News Writers For Its Social Sidebar. Bing is dipping its toes into a form of what Google calls “authorship” with today’s announcement that news writers are now being featured in Bing’s Social Sidebar. U.S. -based searchers can now see journalists appearing in the “People Who Know” section of the Bing sidebar.
These authors are often mixed in with those who appeared in “People Who Know” before — people who’ve answered questions on Quora or who tweet regularly about the search topic. Here’s a search I just did for “seattle mariners,” which shows two authors in “People Who Know” along with several others. Those who are appearing as “authors” can be distinguished from others in the “People Who Know” section because they’ll have the words “writes for” after their names and hovering over their profiles brings up a list of articles, rather than a list of tweets or other social media links.
We were also told there are about 45,000 authors in the group, and that Bing plans to add more to this initial set each day. Future of Mobile News. The era of mobile digital technology has crossed a new threshold. Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet, significantly more than a year ago, and this has major implications for how news will be consumed and paid for, according to a detailed new survey of news use on mobile devices by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) in collaboration with The Economist Group.
At the center of the recent growth in mobile is the rapid embrace by Americans of the tablet computer. Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 22%, now own a tablet device-double the number from a year earlier. Another 3% of adults regularly use a tablet owned by someone else in their home. And nearly a quarter of those who don’t have a tablet, 23%, plan to get one in the next six months. Even more U.S. adults (44%) have smartphones, according to the survey, up from 35% in May 2011.
Among the detailed findings of the study: In Changing News Landscape, Even Television is Vulnerable. Trends in News Consumption: 1991-2012 Overview The transformation of the nation’s news landscape has already taken a heavy toll on print news sources, particularly print newspapers. But there are now signs that television news – which so far has held onto its audience through the rise of the internet – also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers.
Online and digital news consumption, meanwhile, continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. These are among the principal findings of the Pew Research Center’s biennial news consumption survey, which has tracked patterns in news use for nearly two decades. The decline of print on paper spans beyond just newspapers.
The changing demographics of the TV news audience are particularly noticeable in the. Twitter Not Yet A Mainstream Technology. It’s official: News consumption is all about social and mobile. How Journalists Are Using Pinterest. Pinterest is quickly finding its way into the social strategies of media organizations large and small, even as the company itself is still figuring out its business model. Here's how they're using the virtual scrapbooking service. (Part 2 of a 4-part series on how journalists are using social networks beyond Facebook and Twitter.)
For a publisher, Pinterest's chief advantages are twofold. First, it engages readers in a new context, one that is uniquely visual. It also turns out to have big potential in the traffic-driving department. See also: How Journalists Are Using Instagram Like more established social networks, Pinterest is used to share links to articles, photos, and other content.
Pinterest has been flooded with recipes and other food-related images. Contrary to its early reputation, Pinterest is about much more than dessert porn and wedding plans. Al Jazeera eschews such broad strokes in favor of granular, topic-specific boards. Part 1: How Journaists Are Using Instagram. Marco.org. News App News360 Announces Publisher Program With The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, And Others. Taptu’s Acqusition By MediaFed Hints At Smart Move To Put The Heat On Flipboard And The Rest. Friendster Founder Jonathan Abrams Launches Nuzzel: A Fast, Simple, Social News Reader. Here's How I Tracked News About Andy Murray Today. Why I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. News360 For iPad Deserves A Spot In Your News Reading Habit [iOS Tips. First Look: State, A Streams App Of The Future. How Online Reading Is Changing - And How to Cope! Never Lose Another Link: The Uber-Geek's Guide to Reading Online.
The ins and outs of Instapaper. Prismatic Architecture - Using Machine Learning on Social Networks to Figure Out What You Should Read on the Web. We’re entering a golden age of news geekery. Google I/O Fireside Chat: How Google is Pulling an Apple with Google+ RWW Recommends: The Best Mobile RSS Reader. How To Track Topics On The Web. Bookmark and Read Later Apps Compared: Read It Later vs. Instapaper vs. Readability. If you have news, it will be aggregated and/or curated. Comment nous arrive l’information ? Prendre la mesure des liens faibles.
The 50+ Best Ways to Curate and Share Your Favorite Social Media and News Content. Hands-on: News.me's iPhone app filters your friends' timelines for news. News.me Is Building A News Social Network Within Its New iPhone App. Can News.me become the Instagram for news? News.me for iPhone Makes Friends the Editors of Twitter & Facebook.