This past week Betaworks and Bit.ly unveiled their new iPad news reader, News.me.
I've been working on a news reader of my own for the past few months (Paper Buff), so I was anxiously awaiting their launch. I have incredible respect for Andy and John and the Betaworks team; I had the privilege of working out of the Betaworks offices for two months last summer (on my own, unaffiliated project). Aside: I think they are going to be the next Y-Combinator, in that we will soon see the rise of numerous Betaworks clones once people realize how successful they've been in their approach of both launching products from within, and then investing in complementary startups. News.me joins Chartbeat, Social Flow, and, of course, Bit.ly, as one of the companies launched from the ground up by Betaworks. The existing three are all crushing it.
After playing with News.me for a few days, these are my initial thoughts:
1) It is beautifully designed
News.me is gorgeous. To pay it the highest compliment I can: it's crafted like an Apple product. There's a Jobs-like attention to detail. You can "peak" at the full-text of an article form the home timeline with a simple pinch gesture. The header's carousel of avatars provides a clever navigation bar to jump between different feeds. It displays text and images beautifully.
2) The filtering is poor
A central problem in online news is information overload. I only want to see articles about things I care about, but instead my news feeds (whether it's the Times, Reddit, or Twitter) are crowded with irrelevant noise. This turns out to be a very hard problem to solve, but I was curious to see how news.me would address it.
Thus far, I've been underwhelmed by news.me's relevance filtering, which relies on bit.ly's bit.rank popularity algorithm in addition to some personalization techniques. I am currently working on my own Twitter filtering algorithm for Paper Buff, which actually uses bit.ly data as one of many factors. So while I understand that it can take time to train filtering algorithms, I am still wholly disappointed by news.me's initial efforts. One example is that this morning my home feed contained duplicate entries of the exact same New York Times article. I would expect even a basic filter to prevent this. Tech note: If you're interested, we achieve this on Paper Buff by using URL stemming to trim non-essential params. For instance, http://www.nytimes.com/tech/article1.html?ref=home&topic=tech is stemmed to nytimes.com/tech/article1.html.
Its real shortcoming, however, is poor personalization. Zite, which is a hot iPad news reader and a direct competitor to news.me let's you explictly personalize your news by, for instance, liking particular articles, authors, sources, and even keywords. You train it to learn your tastes, and it works pretty well, even though it requires some extra work. News.me, on the other hand, appears to rely on implicit data (namely, whether or not you click on articles, and whether or not other people have clicked them). I worry that this approach is simply inferior. I much prefer the article discovery experience on Zite, even when taking into account that I've trained it much more (i.e. Zite worked a lot better after 3 days than news.me did). Meanwhile, my perfect news reader, which is what I'm currently trying to build, would go beyond popularity and simple taste profiling to also add intelligent filtering, like the ability to group stories about the same topic, or to predict whether or not I'll be interested in a given piece of breaking news. I was hoping for something of the sort from news.me, but the first iteration is pretty disappointing.
3) The publishing parternships should be leveraged more
News.me has unprecedented cooperation from major publishers, 600 in all, chief among them the venerable New York Times. In the long-term I imagine this will become a double-edged sword: the benefits of access to their content might be outweighed by the limitations it places on their ability to truly disrupt the news industy. For example, The New York Times could veto potential features that users might want if it feels news.me is threatening its core businesses. Given these risks, I'm surprised that news.me didn't leverage these partnerships more than it did. Other than the ability to read the article text without ads (which I can already do on any number of other apps), and the presence of several recommended curators from the Times, I didn't really see any other signs of the parternship. They should definitely add things like publisher channels (e.g. a personalized NY Times feed), and generally try much harder to make the most of these rare collaborations.
4) I dislike "reverse following"
News.me's most novel feature is what it calls "reverse following": rather than showing you the articles a friend is sharing, it shows you the articles that they are seeing in their feed. While it's certainly a clever twist, I found it to have two fatal flaws: I care more about relevance than discovery (Twitter is perfectly adequate for discovery) and in this sense it added to my pain point rather than solving it (there is no shortage of irrelevant articles, I don't need more); and, even more problematically, since news.me doesn't entirely filter out non-news (e.g. personal instagram photos), I saw a lot of intimate stories from total strangers (i.e. friends of experts who I follow), which felt both irrelevant and creepy.
5) I like the idea of a "news-only" context, but think News.me should take it further
News.me should go all the way with filtering out non-news tweets (no cat pictures, no "check out my breakfast" blog posts, etc.). Currently they remove tweets without links in them, but they include twitpic and instagram photos (and the like), almost none of which have anything to do with "news." I really like the idea of a news-only context. The single, biggest contributor to the signal-to-noise problem is social news mixing in with my news news. Twitter now realizes that its strength is news and not social networking, and if they could snap their fingers and change it, I think they would make all the social networking noise disappear. News.me has an opportunity to do this, and they should. Also, this could help them differentiate themselves from Flipboard, another direct competitor (that just raised $50 million), which emphasizes social feeds alongside mainstream news.
6) The app does not justify its price tag of $0.99/week
At the end of the day, the big question about news.me is whether or not it justifies its $35-$52/year price tag. Its biggest competitors, Flipboard and Zite, are both free. In order to make people consider the jump between free and any price news.me needs to deliver an experience that is substantially better. It does not.
Conclusion
Overall, I think News.me is beautifully executed and refreshingly ambitious, but I am skeptial of its value proposition to readers. It is certainly worth downloading for free and trying for a week, but without more intelligent filtering I will not start paying at the end of the trial period.
The Betaworks team is incredibly smart, though, so I'm curious to see how they iterate. With unprecedented partnerships, and unbridled access to bit.ly and Twitter data, not to mention an extremely capable team, they really have an opportunity to build something special. I'm excited to see how news.me evolves.
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Also, if you're interested, check out Paper Buff, and we'll invite you to the Alpha.