Comments on: Can News.me become the Instagram for news?

By: Mikko Koskinen

Mikko Koskinen — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:37:30 +0000

Interesting move from News.me. The idea of building a social network around news is compelling. But learnings with our curation startup Scoopinion have shown that people love to share stories, but not within the curation service.
We had discussion on place and users got notifications if a story they read throughoutly got commented, but it really didn’t take off. Discussion was sparked, but it happened either in Facebook, Twitter or news site.

Though I remain sceptic, it really is interesting experiment and worth watching. And after Twitter acquired Summify, News.me has to differentiate from being “just” a twitter curator.

By: Coleman Foley

Coleman Foley — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:18:58 +0000

You should probably note that Frrole focuses on local news. News.me is for general news.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:18:10 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Coleman. I agree that the news selection is hampered (or restricted) by the fact that it’s just from people you follow, but it is trying to be a small-scale social network around news so I guess that is the trade off.

By: Amarpreet Kalkat

Amarpreet Kalkat — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:10:59 +0000

Getting news just from the people you follow takes away the whole “serendipitous” aspect of news discovery. It is good, but it is only half of what news should be.
Should swing by http://frrole.com , kinda complementary, with the focus on getting “signal” not out of people you follow, but the whole big universal data set.

By: Coleman Foley

Coleman Foley — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:05:45 +0000

There are some good ideas here, but relevance will be this app’s downfall. It seems to just tell you what content the people you follow are interacting with the most. That is very good for filtering out junk content like spam, but it does a poor job of filtering by my interests. My News.Me feed was very noisy.

Not only the quality, but also the quantity of news is lacking. My feed just doesn’t have enough items, especially when compared with my other discovery tools. Zite beats this app on both quality and quantity, as does Trapit. Neither has the social features of News.me, but content is more important to me.

Both Zite and Trapit focus more on the interest graph than News.me does. The more you focus on the interest graph, the better discovery is for niche topics like, say, content discovery. Trapit ignores social signals, so it finds content that the social web doesn’t, like content discovery articles. Zite is somewhere between the two extremes, so it is best for following more mainstream topics.