Posts Tagged ‘Social News’

Reddit is an unusual beast.  With it’s sparse interface and esoteric terminology, newcomers typically feel like they walked into the wrong club and quickly head back out the door.    But in my experience, Reddit is just like Facebook — people first question why they would bother with another social network, but once they’ve been hit with the offer they can’t refuse, they sign up.  And the reason Reddit is successful is because it definitely makes those undeniably entertaining offers to users.  But let’s look at the reasons the site turns people off at first.

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The New York Times/bit.ly News.me for iPad news app didn’t fit my news reading needs. Flipboard and Zite provide interesting mixes of tradtional news sources as well as new curated by the people you follow on Twitter and friend on Facebook. One of my recent favorites for news reading is, surprisingly, Microsoft’s Bing for iPad search app’s news component. But, the news fiend in me wanted to see other iPad apps with a social news curation bent to it. Two that were suggested to me are Hitpad and Taptu.

I took a look at Hitpad iPad after trying Taptu.

Hitpad 1.3

The first thing that grabs your attention is Hitpad’s amazing looking graphical interface. It is both simple and beautiful at the same time. It might be what Apple CEO Steve Jobs once referred to as a “lickable interface”. Each topic areas has information categorized by type: News, tweets, videos, web, and photos. While Hitpad looks better than and is more readable than Taptu, its news curation is fixed. Linking to your Twitter and/or Facebook account is just for sharing information. It does not use your own sources for news curation. I asked Hitpad founder and CEO Jay Meydad about Hitpad’s current curation process. He said: The trending topics are coming from numerous high authority news sites that we monitor, aggregate, analyze, rank & optimize. He also noted that a new version will be released soon that will have additional improvements to this process. One process I hope will be tuned a bit more is the tweet source. I found too many tweets in languages I do not read (anything but English). Thus, the tweet stream was often useless to me.

Both Taptu and Hitpad are promising news apps. Both need a bit more tweaking to optimize social news feeds.

The New York Times/bit.ly News.me for iPad news app didn’t fit my news reading needs. Flipboard and Zite provide interesting mixes of tradtional news sources as well as new curated by the people you follow on Twitter and friend on Facebook. One of my recent favorites for news reading is, surprisingly, Microsoft’s Bing for iPad search app’s news component. But, the news fiend in me wanted to see other iPad apps with a social news curation bent to it. Two that were suggested to me are Hitpad and Taptu.

I took a look at Taptu first.

Taptu 1.4.1

Taptu combines conventional news feeds as well as social network feeds from Twitter and Facebook. You might be able to note from my screenshot that I couldn’t get the Twitter feed to work with Taptu. I contacted Taptu and let them know about the problem. They said that some people were able to work around it by logging out of Twitter, deleting the feed, re-adding it, and re-logging it. I tried doing this to no avail. Taptu is looking into the problem. Their Facebook link worked fine. However, it did not filter out non-link status updates from ones with links in it. The result is a noisy row with little news information.

Feeds from news sites were more useful. Tapping on a news item rectangle exposes a reading area in the lower half of the iPad’s display. I like the ability slide from story to story without returning to the row of news items. You can share any news item via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Putting the Twitter issue to the side for now, I found the Facebook feed to be too noisy to be useful as social network curated news source. The app could benefit from some small graphical interface design changes like less white space between news boxes in a category row and larger fonts in those boxes.

Big changes have been happening at MySpace over the past several months as the once dominant social networking site tries to re-orient itself in a post-Facebook world. Shortly after unveiling a slick new design this month, the Beverly Hills based company launched an all new music video recommendation app for web and iPad called Music Romeo. By beefing up their still thriving social music business, MySpace is signalling a shift away from direct competition with Facebook, where it has been steadily losing ground over the past several years. Using recommendation search technology by Australia’s We Are Hunted, MySpace’s Music Romeo represents a refreshing and necessary change in direction. Read more

D.C. based Mixx is releasing some new features today which empowers a few select “super mixers.” The goal of the new feature is to get breaking news onto the homepage fast rather than waiting for numerous votes to build up before the article ends up in the popular section. The way the service works, as Mike Arrington points out,

Once a story has been tagged by two Super Mixxers, the story goes to the home page under the Breaking News area. The story will continue to build up votes and move into the general Popular area of the page at that time. Others may drop off entirely.

This new feature is a strike against Digg which requires a significant number of diggs before hitting the homepage. Then again, a truly newsworthy story can build up a lot of buzz rather quickly on Digg, still reaching the homepage in a short amount of time. Mixx has been excellent at continuously rolling out new services but I’m a little bit hesitant about saying this new service is an excellent service.

My biggest concern is that favoritism may not be the best way to get a community built. Then again, rewarding members for being active is not such a bad idea. Additionally, just because their story is breaking news doesn’t ensure that the article will move to the popular section. Whether or not this is the best decision has yet to be decided by the Mixx community but Mixx has been quick to adapt so if the community doesn’t support it, I’m sure Mixx wouldn’t either.

After seeing Mixx at MashMeet DC a few weeks ago, I’ve realized the value in building sub-communities within the social news sites. Mixx is embracing that with their support of tags and this strategy will hopefully put them on top of other social news sites.