Yahoo unveiled their curated news service last week for Android and has been available for iOS earlier this year. The premise of this app is to give you 10 new stories every twelve hours, focusing stories relevant to the UK, US, Canada and international events.
The top Yahoo brass is happy that 40% of all users who have the app installed, access it on a daily basis. The news that Yahoo curates basically give you the gist of a major news item or event. Every story consists of a Yahoo summary, plus several “Atoms,” or key quotes, images, videos, Wikipedia excerpts and other material relevant to the story. Since the news on this app is basically a summary each story has close to 10 references, so you can dive deeper into something that rivets you. Twitter also plays apart in the layout with sites such as Cnet, Verge, Reuters all weighing in. The idea is to give you more information than the typical wire service story or single-sourced report.
Twitter are quickly becoming a metaphor of the way news stories develop. Frequently you will receive news on these sites first and news outlets will pick up on it. The Arab Spring, internet suspensions in Turkey and the war in Syria all broke on Twitter first. Companies like Facebook and Yahoo are betting on curated stories with sourced information from Twitter and other breaking news outlets. This app feels very much like a product from 2014, which is quite refreshing. Its layout is intuitive and easy to dive in for ten minutes and get a sense on the day’s top stories.
Download Yahoo News Digest for Android today.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
