Brand & Content Curation

News.me is a social news service built on top of Twitter, creating a stream of the ‘best’ news being shared by people you follow. In addition to people who you already follow, the app suggests ‘featured users’, such as well-known VC Fred Wilson, Digg founder Kevin Rose and AOL’s Arianna Huffington.

Erich Schonfeld on News.me Erich Schonfeld does a once over on News.me, the new Betaworks/NY Times collaboration on social news. He is likes what he sees: “ News.me is a social news reading app that...

News.me, the long-awaited social news service developed in collaboration with Betaworks, a technology incubator, and The New York Times Company, is ready for its debut.
News.me is a newsfeed that uses artificial intelligence to monitor what people are reading and learn what they like to read; it then provides articles and links that will probably be of interest.

Tomorrow, all eyes will be on the launch of News Corp's iPad newspaper The Daily, but huddled away in a downtown loft in New York City's meatpacking district a team from betaworks and the New York Times are busy putting together their answer to what an iPad news app should be. The collaboration will be called News.me, and it won't look anything like The Daily. I know because I've been playing with an early version of the app, which I will describe in detail below along with the first-ever published screenshots of the app.

News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but also bit.ly, the betaworks company that shortens billions of shared links every month. In contrast, The Daily will produce its own articles and videos with a staff of 100 journalists. It is not clear how many social features will be included in The Daily, but the emphasis seems to be more on the original content. We'll find out more tomorrow (I'll be covering the launch).