A collaboration between Bit.ly and the NY Times, the social news app News.me launched in the iTunes store today. It’s powered off your Twitter account, drawing from stories shared by people you’re following.
“Before you say ‘not another iPad news reader,’ News.me is different,” says John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, the parent company of Bit.ly. “These streams are filtered and ranked using algorithms developed by the bitly team to extract a measure of social relevance from the billions of clicks and shares in the bitly data set. This is fundamentally a different kind of social news experience.”
You can also look at what your Twitter friends are reading if they’re News.me subscribers. And News.me has included several suggested streams from people like Maria Popova, Nicholas Kristof, Steven Johnson, Arianna Huffington and Clay Shirky. “It’s almost as if I’m leaning over your shoulder — reading what you read, or looking at your book shelves: it allows me to understand how the people I follow construct their world,” Borthwick says.
News.me is a paid subscription app. You’ll get 7 days to try it for free, then it’s .99 a week. Many stories are displayed in full — without ads — due to partnership agreements with several major publishers like NYTimes.com. News.me shares revenue, based on consumption, with its content partners.
The experience is slick. Beyond the page turn (above), you can also “pinch” to read more of a story in your stream. You can bookmark stories, save on Instapaper and share them on Facebook, Twitter and email.
One big drawback to the app is it’s limited to the active Twitter universe. And there’s the bigger question about the longevity of social news aggregators — especially paid apps — as the competition heats up.
