More than a year ago, I asked, “What Is Networked News?” I was thinking about how people really, actually want to get their news, and my answer came in three parts.
Let’s focus briefly on the first two. (1) People care about who writes it or creates it. In other words, people want their news from trusted publishers. (2) People also care about who likes it. In other words, people want their news from trusted consumers—their “friends.”
News in the modern era has naturally revolved around publishers. That part’s old-hat, and so people need little help from innovators in getting their news from publishers. But innovators have made tremendous accomplishments in helping people get their news from their friends. This is largely the story of the success of Web 2.0 so far, and many startups have engineered ingenious systems for delivering news to people because their friends like it.
FriendFeed is one such awesome story. Twitter’s another. Google Reader’s “share” feature and its openness, which has allowed others to build applications on top of it, make for another perfect example. The ethic of the link among bloggers is, in a very real way, central to this concept: one person referring others to someone else’s thoughts.
But I also wrote about a third way. (3) People want their news about what interests them. This may seem like a trivial statement, but it is deeply important. There is still tons of work to be done by innovators in engineering systems for actually delivering news to people because they want exactly what they want and don’t want any of the rest.
Twine’s “twines” come close. Socialmedian’s “news networks” come close. They’re both examples of innovation moving in the right direction.
But they don’t go nearly far enough. Twine looks like it’s got significant horsepower under the hood, but it lacks the intuitive tools to deliver. Frankly, it’s badly burdened by its overblown vision of a tricked-out Semantic Web application that’s everything to all people all the time. Twine is, as a result, an overcomplicated mess.
Socialmedian’s problem are worse, however. It’s simply underpowered. Nothing I’ve read, including its press release reproduced here, indicates the kind of truly innovative back-end that can revolutionize the news. Socialmedian wraps a stale social donut around Digg, and I’m afraid that’s about it.
When it comes to the news, people demand (1), (2), and (3). They want their most trusted publishers and their most trusted friends, and they want to personalize their interests with radical granularity. That takes an intense back-end, which Socialmedian simply lacks. That also takes an elegant user-facing information architecture, which Twine lacks.
We’ve had (1) for years, and I’m thrilled at the advances I see made seemingly every day toward a more perfect (2). But a killer news web application has yet to deliver on (3). When it does, we’ll have something that’s social and powerful and dead-simple too.
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