Apps that provide daily news summaries are the current rage. It appears that we’ve moved on from our Weather app and Messaging app obsessions. It’s a worthy goal, though. We’ve created so much noise on the Internet, we owe it to people to build tools to help them navigate all the noise we made. It’s the only viable solution.
Cynicism aside, though, I download all these apps and try them out. Sometimes they rotate on to my home screen for a while. Yahoo News Digest lasted a while. Everyone loves Circa so I tried that for a while, but it was still too much for me. The problem with the news is that it never ends — there are no edges — which is the reason these apps exist in the first place.
The one that I keep coming back to is NYT Now. I really, really love this app. The morning and afternoon briefings are succinct, and give me the sense that I got the day’s most important news. And I can dig deeper if I want to. It’s on my home screen and will probably stay there.
The latest entry to this market is Flipboard’s The Daily Edition. I use Flipboard every day (hey, you should subscribe to my Flipboard Magazine!), so it’s a natural extension and one less app to follow. My only problem with it so far is that I can’t remove sections I’m not interested in (Sports, ugh).
Anyway, the reason I write about this is that there’s something I don’t understand about this space. All these apps were built from the ground up to do some kind of human curation and give people a sense of the most important news of the day. But the two companies that have all the data in the world to make this happen — Facebook and Twitter — haven’t jumped in. I guess you could argue that Paper is Facebook’s attempt at this, but not really because they hedged their bets by making it a full-featured Facebook client anyway.
I don’t know if this is Innovator’s Dilllemma or what, but it seems like these two companies could make kick-ass daily news apps with data they already have at their disposal. Why haven’t they done this?