Last September, YourVersion took the stage at TechCrunch50 as the DemoPit People’s Choice winner, after receiving the most votes from conference attendees. The startup’s goal is fairly simple: to help you find content that you’re interested in, in real time. And now it’s bringing its application to the iPhone. You can download the free app here.
The app is pretty straightforward. First, you enter some topics that you’re interested in. Every time you launch the app, you’ll be presented with a list of these topics. Clicking on one will bring you to a list of recent blog posts, tweets, and other content that contains those topic keywords. You can also filter through this content by source, allowing you to see only content from Twitter, news sites, and so on. If you’ve already set up an account on the YourVersion website, you can sync that with the app (any items you bookmark or share from the app will be reflected on the site as well).
Of course, there are plenty of other applications out there that let you search for news stories by keyword. YourVersion tries to go a step further than basic keyword matching by adding some intelligence to its story recommendations. In the current version, the app will track all of its users’ attention data, which includes the stories they’ve click on, shared, given thumbs up/down to, and a handful of other metrics. YourVersion then uses this data to generate a weekly Email digest, which includes the week’s top stories from each of your YourVersion topics (it will omit any stories that you’ve already read).
This is only the first step, though. In the next month or so, the site plans to roll out a feature to both its website and the iPhone application that will use this attention data to enhance the “Discover page” (the section of the app that presents you with recent stories), so that you don’t have to wait til the end of the week to get smarter recommendations.
YourVersion still has a lot of work to do — in its current form, there isn’t much to differentiate it from the countless feed readers and news apps already out there. The app needs to implement more robust algorithms that can provide story recommendations that are both more timely and accurate than its competitors’.
Jason,
Thanks so much for your post! We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from users of our free YourVersion iPhone App.
At YourVersion, we really value customer feedback, so please let us know how we can make the app even better by emailing us at feedback AT yourversion.com or @YourVersion on Twitter.
Thanks and happy discovering!
Dan Olsen
CEO & Founder, YourVersion
Hi Dan, it was nice meeting you and your partner at Twiistup 007.
I remember you saying that you got the Android version QA’d and that you’ll be releasing that any day now.
I have both the iPhone and Android as I mentioned, but prefer Android as my daily mobile OS. So I look forward to seeing the Android version at work!
Nice meeting you at Twiistup, too. Yes, we hope to have our free Android app out soon. In the mean time, I should mention that the mobile version of our website at m.yourversion.com works in mobile Webkit browsers (e.g., Android & Palm).
One thing I forgot to mention: we let you use Facebook Connect for quicker signup (on our free iPhone app and on m.yourversion.com).
As soon as we launch the YourVersion Android app, we’ll tweet the news from @YourVersion.
Thanks!
OK Dan,
I have our Twitter feed following @YourVersion
Can’t wait for the announcement so I can finally try the app version on Android.
Thanks Jason – good post! I just tried the YourVersion app and I’m finding some great stories. Seems like a cool way to keep up on the topics I care about when I have spare time. I like how I was able to use Facebook Connect to sign up quickly.
This is awesome..congrats, Dan!
Thanks, Nilesh!
Way to get the people at http://www.youversion.com/ all excited just to find out that they are one character to short.
Congrats to the YourVersion team.
(I am the project manager for YouVersion, the online Bible with a handful of native mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Java. I was admittedly a little confused when I saw the title, seeing as how we’ve had an iPhone app since the App Store opened and the fact that I didn’t contact TechCrunch and we weren’t vying for the TC50.)
Anyway, it’s good to see YourVersion land on the iPhone! Woohoo!
Hi Scott,
Thanks! Nice to connect with someone from the YouVersion team. I’m sure we’ve sent lots of visitors to each others’ websites. At least we both offer discovery (just different kinds
Best of luck to YouVersion!
Congratulations, Dan! That’s a beautiful looking app.
Thanks, Mark!
Great work guys, it’s awesome to see the progress you’ve made since the initial launch. Keep it up!
Thanks, Dylan!