At Lean Startup Machine in Toronto this past weekend, participant teams were asked to pitch a viable business idea and then test it out (read our wrap up). But while there was no end of creativity in the room, some concepts stuck out as more conceptually intriguing than others. Here, the Standard highlights a couple of the most promising ideas.
If there’s nugget of truth we can all agree upon when it comes to online news, it’s that there’s too goddamn much of it. With the veritable torrent of links from Twitter, Facebook, RSS and Google News, staying on top of the news that’s important is increasingly becoming difficult and frustrating.
It’s no surprise, then, that this is a problem many are working on. Twitter’s recent acquisition of Summify, which gathered the top links from your social circle, suggests that how to curate and filter news is the next big challenge for those who are in the business of informing people.
The trouble, however, is that no solution has proven ideal (the Standard looked at a few earlier last year). There are two major approaches–algorithms and social, and each have their flaws. Algorithms, like those used by Google News, are clever bits of software that select stories for you based on certain inputted variables such as past behaviour. The problem is that they’re not clever enough to know that because everyone is linking to that story about Apple’s huge sales, it doesn’t mean you want to read it again. On the other hand, social solutions like Percolate can be better, as they pull in and aggregate links from people you trust on Twitter and Facebook. But the issue there is that your friends are human, and even the smartest of them will link to fluff or entertainment news that you already get enough of.
It’s for this reason that Newsana seems like an interesting proposition. It’s being developed by Ben Peterson and Jon Wong, and it differs from other approaches because it looks to only collect what Peterson calls “news of global significance,” rather than more bits about Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga. The goal is to have users focus in on a topic like the Arab revolts or the Euro debt crisis and have them see the top 5 or 6 news stories as voted on by a community. Instead of a glut of links, you get handpicked pieces judged to the best.
That list will get produced by the community who will submit links they find interesting to Newsana, and the service will then parse them to present the top ones in each area. A helpful wrinkle is that Newsana’s community of curators will itself be curated, and Peterson envisions a reputation system down the road that will see certain people become specialists in a given field. Finding a well-reviewed link first or consistently staying atop a subject area will add to a user’s reputation. To make the process of submission easier, the team is considering having users only be able to submit one story per day, which reduces the barriers to entry but also may help to ensure quality.
Peterson is clear to point out that Newsana serves a niche market of “people who are into international news or, say, read the Economist.” Still, it’s a big market as niches go, and is nonetheless a compelling idea. Imagine clicking on a topic like American politics and, rather than a scattershot burst of stories from all over, seeing a vetted list of news from a variety of sources. For news nerds, it’s a pretty exciting idea, in large part because it seems to combine the best aspects of social curation and editorial expertise.
Of course, compelling ideas don’t necessarily always make for compelling products. Peterson and Wong’s challenge will be to make the experience as slick and as transparent for users as they can, making it easy to integrate into daily routines, connecting the service with other social networks so that these curated lists are easy to share. If they can manage that, those who are constantly looking to stay informed may have another useful tool in their online belt.
Navneet Alang is Toronto Standard’s tech critic. Follow him on Twitter at @navalang.
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