It’s fair to say that I was not caught up in royal baby fever last week. I do have some thoughts on Apple News though: The Royal Spotlight on Apple News on Lounge Ruminator.
@martinfeld I've tried it and regret to inform you that it's not good. The '+' component is really just an awkward, buggy and ill-targeted magazine stand. I can believe I'm so far from the target demographic that my sense is completely wrong but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Apple kills it within 12 months.
@pyrmont Hmmm... as I feared! I hope that it's a success, even if it's just purely to encourage more people to read long-form articles and magazines, rather than scrolling through social media for clickbait. It's the content part that concerns me but I think that I may be far from the target demographic too, like you've said. I subscribe to a couple of PDF magazines, like The Nib, and really enjoy the experience of reading content like that on my iPad. What would be the one big thing that could be improved that would convince you to keep it?
@martinfeld With the enormous caveat that I don't think this is what a large number of people want, what I'm looking for is essentially paid RSS. Suck in all the stories that are coming from publications I'm interested in, writers I want to follow or topics I care about and then present that to me in a story-by-story manner.
Have an interface that has two dimensions: one that is optimised for triaging what's new and one that is optimised for reading. Bring my Safari reading list in and make those stories feel on an equal playing field.
Then embrace the web. Give me share links to the actual publicly available versions of these stories. Trust that your service will succeed on word of mouth recommendations from your users (and by being installed by default) and not on 'tricking' people to open the app by using a URL you forced on your users.
@pyrmont Well, frankly, that sounds perfect. I’d certainly pay for it. I enjoy RSS but there is a certain feeling of silence, loneliness or separation in using it, which has probably been brought about by the wave of social media and algorithmic recommendations that we now consider to be normal. There’s always other stuff. What you propose sounds like it blends the two nicely. That being said, having something like Micro.blog has been a good antitode to that, since I can write something or share someone a news article and then have a legitimate conversation about it with someone.
@martinfeld I'm pretty sure if we'd both pay for it, that's a sign that it doesn't have mass appeal :P