

Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’ - mattculbreth
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/16/ex-google-news-bing-engineers-set-out-to-build-newspaper-of-the-future/

======
lkozma
I wonder if personalized news has that much appeal, really. Part of the
success of traditional tv, radio and newspapers is the shared experience with
some group you identify with.

Incidentally, this is why I read news.YC also, it's fascinating to read what
smart people have to say after they have been exposed to the same stimulus
like you. With traditional media, this discussion was in the pubs or the
workplace the day after.

Traditional media is not necessarily dying because the stories are not
interesting, well that's the symptom, but the cause is maybe that the group is
not one that you feel you belong to anymore, and the content is taylored to
the mean of that group anyway.

~~~
ynniv
The product seems like a shiny interface to a personalized Google News, which
as you say is just not very interesting.

A word to aspiring news startups: journalism is old and sophisticated - try
learning something about it instead of pretending it is a data clustering or
personalization problem.

------
pclark
News is a funny market. If you say to someone "we'll help you find interesting
or relevant news articles" they'll shrug and say it isn't a problem. Keeping
informed as to what is happening in the world is a solved problem - by
editors.

And whilst the current solutions (eg: everyone sees the same content on BBC)
aren't _perfect_ they're _good enough_ and this is a tough product to justify
to users.

Additionally, changing habits is really really hard. People habitually load
nytimes.com every lunch time to see what is happening in the world - and you
expect to shift that habit - for a marginal improvement in life? The brand
loyalty with publications is ridiculously strong, not only do I _trust_ The
Financial Times, I _hate_ the alternatives. "You just called me a Daily Mail
reader? I am _literally_ offended."

A lot of people insist that RSS Readers are too complex, and juggling multiple
sources without an RSS Reader is too hard. That's true, but in reality most
people don't care. If you think about it - people use different destinations
for just about everything, so it's tough to imagine why _this_ should be
consolidated.

Another small problem with this market is that algorithm aggregators become
over tuned. You read six articles about BP and suddenly your newspaper is less
of the brilliant news paper and more of a BP quarterly earnings report. So
then you down vote a few articles and then you miss the next BP scandal a few
months later.

Also with this product - I'm expected to "thumb up" interesting news articles,
this hurts emotionally if I'm "thumb up-ing" a news article about six 21 year
old american soldiers being limbless in Iraq. "Show me more like this?" I
think not.

I think there is significant value in topic communities and curation, an
example of this is the Reddit Subreddits, if you want to stay informed in
Venture Capital, in Golf, or in MotoGP it's quite hard to scratch that itch
and always find cool new content (eg: a few articles a day)

Ask yourself: How would you find up to date content about Fashion? Or Coeliac
Disease? Or Graphic Design.

I think news needs a fundamental shift towards social consumption, I think
Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook have incrementally shifted this towards a
social experience - which is exactly what news is about, it isn't about "being
informed" per se, it's about "being informed _amongst your friends_ " people
want to look like they are in tap with what is happening in the world, and do
not like having to ask their friends what they missed.

~~~
johngunderman
I can't say I understand why some people would consider RSS feeds to be too
complex. There really are only two operations that you have to know how to do:

1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss
button in the url bar.)

2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page
full of articles.

Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it comes
down to it, the system is incredibly simple. Far simpler than visiting a every
site to find updated articles...

~~~
brandnewlow
RSS readers suck. I've signed up for a abandoned Google Reader at least three
times. Here's why:

1\. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow. 2\. Adding all these into
Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying. 3\. Once I add them
in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts. 4\. Suddenly
I'm faced with two things:

    
    
       a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal with.
       b. A generic, plain, boring interface in which Gizmodo articles, Slate articles, NYTimes articles....all look exactly the same, as if they'd been published by...Google.
    

I hate both of these things. I don't need another guilt box nagging me to do
stuff all the time. And I don't know why I'd want to reduce all the lovely web
sites I enjoy reading into a single, generic, designed-by-Google design.
Variety is the spice of life. I'd rather just click on my bookmarks, actually
go to the sites when I want to read stuff from them, and let the publishers
get some ad views in the process.

I can't stand RSS readers.

~~~
shajith
I share this sentiment towards RSS readers to some extent. I've done a similar
signup-giveup dance with Google Reader several times. It is all the _work_ it
adds to my day that I dislike. I've tried desktop RSS readers too, with the
same result. It gets harder to go back after a while too - I can almost feel
the stress increase when I am trying to use an RSS reader again.

I've often felt that something like the "River of News"[1] notion that Dave
Winer likes to talk about would work really well, I wonder if there are any
public services that behave in that manner.

The basic idea is:

1) No read/unread counts. 2) No bold-ing/un-bolding of stuff I have or have
not read. 3) No emphasis on grouping by site - should work out of the box as a
single stream of posts to any of the sites I am interested in. 4) Subscribe
via single-click bookmarklet, ala Instapaper's Read Later bookmarklet.

1: <http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews>

~~~
johngunderman
I do admit, having high unread counts ticks me off. I wouldn't mind seeing
that go. but I try to keep my feeds small so I only get a small stream of
content that is all important to me, instead of a firehose of worthless stuff.

------
jerf
The thing about technological progress is that the replacement is never just
"the old thing, only on computers". When people in the 90s wrote about the
Internet and the Digital Library, quite a lot of them were envisioning
something like Google Books, which is just a collection of books, _only
online!_ What actually _happened_ was Wikipedia. (And a lot of other stuff,
all of which further proves my point, but Wikipedia is sufficient.) Nobody in
the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming. The Digital Library
wasn't just the analog library writ large, it was something new that an analog
library could never do.

Digital newspapers already exist. They are fed by RSS/Atom and do a variety of
exciting things. Adding a top layer of formatting driven by a computer to make
Google Reader (or your favorite RSS/Atom consumer) look like a old-style paper
newspaper is a waste of time, and even worse, a waste of valuable screen
space. Especially if you're going to try to write an algorithm to
automatically figure out what the "top story" is, which will never be as good
as a human. (And as in the first paragraph, there's also a variety of other
things, like Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and all kinds of further digital
elaborations on the fundamental newspaper template as modified by what digital
makes easy and/or possible.)

Trying to replicate the old analog way of doing things is just silly.

~~~
ugh
I don’t necessarily want to disagree with you, just mention that there are
examples were the new thing was the old thing, only on computers. One would be
digital photography. Sure, photography got a lot faster but it’s basically
still the same thing. Changes have been slow and only recently began to have
an impact.

And I don’t think Canon or Nikon did anything wrong. I think that it was
probably correct to understand digital photography as analog photography –
only on computers – first and look which places you can go only after you
executed that perfectly.

~~~
chime
> ...the new thing was the old thing, only on computers. One would be digital
> photography.

And that led the Flickr and Photoblogs & Tumblr. Not the same thing if you ask
me.

~~~
ugh
Eventually. At a time when pros were already routinely shooting with expensive
digital gear that looked and worked a lot like the analog ancestor.

------
credo
_> >and thus "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry"._

Language like this generally makes me more skeptical that they'll accomplish
this

It is one thing to blog or to aggregate "news", it is another to actually
investigate and report the news. I don't know if they realize this, when they
talk about delivering the "final blow to the newspaper industry"

 _> >The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article and add the
hashtag #freeapollo (ha ha, retweet bots!) are getting a promotion code for
the app on iTunes._

Their 1.0 version launched today. Apple only gives you 50 promo codes for an
app version. I wonder whether they really have some way to hand out 100 promo
codes today or whether this is just going to be their first case of over-
promising and under-delivering.

~~~
chc
Maybe 1.0.1 is already in the pipeline. They didn't say all the codes would go
out today.

------
thefrostytruth
This endeavor relies on a healthy ecosystem of news. This product is a
recommendation system, a glorified web browser--not a newspaper. And it's
insane to think that destroying the newspaper business is in these founders'
best interest, if indeed they wish to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper
industry." The arrogance and short-sightedness of the statement is thick.

I will never understand so many technical folks' glee in watching the decline
of investigative reporting, media companies, publishing houses, and so on--
especially when so many applications like this simply exploit the work of
others, add a layer of abstraction on top. ("Exploit" being non-pejorative,
simply descriptive.)

------
billybob
The future of news, as I see it: traditional media mostly dies, leaving a
giant vacuum that part-time enthusiasts can't fill. People don't know what
their local and regional government is up to because research is mostly
boring, and who wants to do boring stuff for free? Corruption increases until
investigative media outlets rise up to do full-time research and exposure.
Frustrated citizens value this enough to pay for it. Paid-for media rises
again, albeit in new forms, supplemented by volunteers.

In other words, the pendulum will swing back and forth as fickle humans change
their mind, just like in politics and most other things in human history.

~~~
axod
Saying that traditional media mostly dies is like saying "Since there's
Youtube now, movie studios and cinemas will die off".

(Yes, I get a newspaper delivered every day, and love reading it).

I get the majority of my news from BBC/other TV, news paper etc. For funny,
biased news, rumors, hyperbole, mob rule etc I go to the internet.

------
Groxx
/pushes button

>modal dialog: "Are you sure you wanted to push that button? No / Yes"

/pushes yes.

/pushes another button

>modal dialog: "You pushed that button you pushed!"

/pushes ok.

Yep, I'm really seeing the Bing/Microsoft side of the application's design. I
wonder if it asks if you want to launch the application when you launch the
application?

I find it particularly ironic that the yes/no dialog comes up on the button
with the _greatest_ amount of error-room, while the one that just says "yaay!"
has essentially the _least_. Apparently they're not a fan of Fitts' Law or its
ramifications; they just put the double-check cost on the hardest button to
miss, and the "congrats" on the one easiest to miss.

------
ghb
Does anyone know if there are amateur news sites that do things like collect
shit people just report like "oh shit, this guy just got hit by a car on Damen
& Wolcott" or "Hey, guys, the regime is cracking down on our protest", or has
Twitter somehow filled in that gap?

------
jroes
Sounds like they have an extremely talented tech team. I'm not sure I find
what they are doing to be particularly groundbreaking or interesting, though.

------
kua
This is interesting considering some of the reaction to the new google news
redesign: <a
href="[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=3b7b36...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=3b7b3632b344057f&hl=en>http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=3b7b3632b344057f&hl=en</a>);

------
rmason
There has never been and never will be a computer algorithm that can take the
place of a good editor. Period, cannot be done but it won't stop the clueless
from trying.

For example I may not wish to ever see stories about say Britnney Spears but I
guarantee if she dies from an overdose tomorrow I will want to know it.

------
ideamonk
Nice to know the problem of content overflow is being solved intelligently.

Haven't spent time finding out it this exists already, but would love to have
sometime which lets me follow a news item over a time period, like a story
unfolding everyday and I could track it from its beginning and analyse like a
detective :P

------
brandnewlow
So they're going to kill newspapers by....stealing all their headlines and
packaging them in a (marginally) better UI...that they charge money for?

Yes, that's definitely going to kill newspapers. Good luck with that one.

Looks like I've got one more line to add to all my robots.txt files.

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redorb
Any ideas what they are doing in their source of their homepage with
G-analytics JS written 4 times in a row? Then also it seems 2 more times at
the bottom; Is that A/B testing or are they pumping numbers>? (and surely
pumping numbers this way wouldnt work)

~~~
icey
It's most likely a result of bad programming. My guess is that the page is
made up of a bunch of components using templates.

Instead of including the GA-JS in one master template, it's probably being
included in one of the templates that gets rendered multiple times.

------
joubert
Interesting that the company uses @gmail.com email accounts and not their own
domain name: <http://www.hawthornelabs.com/about.html>

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w1ntermute
Direct link to video of Apollo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqlu-kWAcHA>

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cjoh
The music in the video had to be the worst selection of music for a demo video
of all time. Note to self. Lay off the beat boxing.

------
code_duck
It's about time someone did . I have to say, the Google News improvements
recently released were not improvements.

------
mark_l_watson
Big advantage running in a rich client app: easier to collect data on who
spends time reading what articles.

------
roboneal
No real mystery...

Newspapers = day old news printed on paper.

