Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been an Official Contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.
If there was a time-lapse video chronicling how humans have shared and received news information throughout history, the transcript of that video would go something like this: Chest-thumping. Hand gestures. Screaming. Cave paintings. Language. Carrier pigeons, or personal messengers. Scrolls and the printing press. Pamphlets, periodicals, telegrams, and newspapers. Eventually, television, and the Web, most recently fueled by blogs and social networks. Status updates, tweets, Instagrams. Whatever the time period, humans have constantly (re)invented new mediums and channels to get information (despite paywalls), some faster than others.
Fast-forward today, with social firmly stitched into the web’s fabric, it’s cliche to point out there are a dizzying amount of information sources and channels from which to find this information. Stepping back from firehose, I see people receiving and consuming news through the following three main avenues listed below. (As a disclaimer, (1) I won’t be able to list each and every service in each category, because that would be impossible; (2) some of the examples are influenced by multiple categories, but I’m trying to isolate and highlight the essence of each service’s offering; and (3) I realize many, many people still get their information via traditional channels like network/cable television, radio, and print daily newspapers and their online extensions.)
This is a lot of information about information, and fascinating to see how new mobile platforms, new technologies, and new communities and network graphs power the creation and advancement of these new channels. Gone are the days when everyone reads The New York Times, USA Today, and watches the nightly news on television. That much is obvious, and has been exacerbated over the past few years, though in 2012, with all of these new services recently launching, it seems to have been kicked into another gear, where the same kernel of information passes through what seems like an infinite maze to reach us in different forms.
Maybe I’m an outlier as a consumer in this space. As the number of channels increase, Twitter becomes exponentially more critical to me, both as a lens into the world and a strong meta-filter for what I allow to creep into my limited attention. I view the web through Twitter on every device and I subscribe to the summary email newsletters from each of the few main information services I use. I also file things into Pocket to read later or flip through Flipboard or Prismatic if I feel overwhelmed by my reading list, and that’s about it.
But, that’s only me. For many others, especially given the scale of mobile, a host of other services are robust enough to act as “go-to” destinations and entirely “new” news brands. No matter which way you prefer to get your news, there’s a service or app that will likely fill your needs and delivered information filtered to you by a host of signals and variables. It’s all the news that’s not only fit to print, but at this specific moment in time, also fit to reinvent, though the eternal challenge of focusing on what’s most important — in a day when it’s easy for everyone to create content — may remain as elusive as ever.
Photo Credit: miggslives / Flickr Creative Commons
Never miss an important story about a friend, professional contact, or public figure you care about. Newsle is a web application that allows you to follow real news about your Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, and favorite public figures. While there are already “people search” sites and social news aggregators, Newsle does two things that haven’t been done before: Finds real news about–not by–your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts (no tweets, no statuses, no “social noise”) Combines this with news about public figures...
More and more people are relying on mobile as their primary source of news yet the content itself continues to be produced in a format that translates very poorly to mobile devices. Rather than trying to shoehorn existing content into a new environment, Circa is creating the first born-on-mobile news experience. It will deliver news in a unique format – native to mobile devices with an experience intuitive to mobile users. Through comprehensive yet to-the-point news updates paired...
Prismatic is a personal newsfeed based on your interests.
Flipboard is a digital social magazine that aggregates web links from your social circle, i.e. Twitter and Facebook, and displays the content in magazine form on an iPad.
Pocket is a service that lets you save what you find on the web to watch and read on any device, anytime. Founded in August 2007 by Nate Weiner, it is now based in San Francisco.
Instapaper is a simple bookmarking tool. It is both a web-based app and there is an iPhone version. It is made by Marco Arment, who was the lead developer for Tumblr.
Simple, intuitive and elegant. Summly redefines news for the mobile world with algorithmically generated summaries from thousands of sources. Innovative gestures, animations and great summaries make reading the news fun: easy to use, easy to scan, easy to read, clear and concise. Nick D’Aloisio launched Summly in December 2011 as a tech summarization prototype that garnered significant interest worldwide. With backing from Horizons Ventures, and help from many NLP and AI experts around the world, Nick and the Summly team...
Upworthy is social media with a mission: to make important stuff as viral as a video of some idiot surfing off his roof. Here’s a piece by The New York Times’ David Carr about their first 100 days.
While Reddit is often compared to Digg, the two sites have some key differences. Reddit has a simple interface and little advertising. Many users love this simplicity. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot, -1 for cold), meaning a story can dance up and down Reddit’s top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. To see what’s on top now, there’s also a “hot” list. This type of...
Hacker News is a user driven social content site focused around startups and hacking. Nearly identical to reddit, Hacker News allows users to share, vote and comment on stories. Hacker News fills a unique spot in the social media arena through its niche content focus and by allowing its users to get advice from the community. Many of its users are involved with, or interested in, the Y Combinator incubator community.
TechMeme works by constantly checking blogs and other news sites to create a page full of the current most popular tech news links. The list of sites TechMeme monitors is constructed automatically and changes in real time based on linking. A small “seeding” list, constructed by creator Gabe Rivera, is used to help the system build the complete list. Stories are placed based on their importance. Importance depends on a number of factors, including links and how old the story...
TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005 by Michael Arrington, is a network of technology-oriented blogs and other web properties.
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