The quest for the perfect news reader

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The quest for the perfect news reader

2 August 2010 | Lawrence Lee

Much has been written about the new Flipboard as a next-generation news reader, and while it is certainly beautiful, easy to use, and easy to customize, I’d like a bit more from my news reader.

Don’t get me wrong, I think aggregators like Flipboard offer a great way to read content from your social information streams. But is it the best way to get your news?

Or let me put it this way: are you doing yourself a disservice when you only read news that comes to your attention through your friends?

Who needs friends when…

On one hand, “friends” serve as a convenient filter for interesting content. I certainly enjoy seeing the links and likes shared via my follows and friends on Facebook and Twitter.

But I didn’t become friends with people because they were experts in my interest areas. Frankly my friends’ interests don’t necessarily overlap with my own, and the cumulative interests of my friends doesn’t exactly cover all of my interests.

The ideal news reader:

would allow me to specify all my interests,
and then intelligently present me quality information in my interest areas,
with just enough transparency for me to choose what I wanted to read, and why.

It would also organize the information along multiple dimensions to give me paths to explore further, to discover new things, and to help me answer questions without forcing me to search in Google or Wikipedia.

I can’t get that kind of content or organization from just my friends and the people I follow.

At PARC, we’ve been thinking about the question, “What news should we read in a world where we are overloaded or can’t get what we need?” (okay, that’s not really the question form but you get my point) — and we’re working on some research projects related to this. One project that we’ve only recently made available in a web demo is Kiffets, which you can read more about here.

I’m not claiming it’s the perfect news reader (yet), but its focus on long tail news curation complements the news I get through my social networks. Read more about how Kiffets helps you tune your news priorities to get what you need.

What are your requests for the perfect news reader?

Editor: Sonal Chokshi

comments (4)

posted in social, mobile, & ubiquitous computing

Comments (4)

August 6th, 2010 at 11:44pm
Posted by Brian Heys

One thing I would like to see in an ideal news reader would be an easy mechanism to share content with people on Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. It would be wonderful to be able to post to these services straight from your newsreader, with a single click, and the option to enter either your own text or use a cut from the original.

August 9th, 2010 at 9:05am
Posted by Lawrence Lee

Thanks Brian – that makes a lot of sense. It’s important to consider the user workflow – read, explore, share/republish – and make it as efficient as possible. Kiffets currently is integrated with Facebook but not Twitter or Delicious.

Here’s another question – what do you think is the right mix between interest-based recommendation and serendipity?

August 9th, 2010 at 12:00pm
Posted by Brian Heys

Tough one! I’m not sure I can answer that, really. To hazard a guess on the safe side, maybe 10%? Depending on how random the non-interest-based recommendations were, they could become irritating. But if they were loosely related to the core interests, I think you could probably up the percentage.

August 9th, 2010 at 3:21pm
Posted by Lawrence Lee

Thanks – we only deal with hard questions here! My guess is pretty close to yours. I think about 5-10% for content that’s popular/interesting but outside my core interests, and the rest should be at least adjacent to my core interests. It would also be nice to have different dials to emphasize personal vs. professional interests at different times and days.

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