JSTN

I live in New York and work at Tumblr.

justinouellette.com

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  News.me, the iPad app I’ve been working on for the last year with my colleagues at bitly and the New York Times R&D Lab, is finally available in the app store.

  A quick summary from John Borthwick’s great blog post outlining some of the history and motivation behind it:

  News.me is a personalized social news reading application for the Apple iPad. It’s an app that lets you browse, discover and read articles that other people are seeing in their Twitter streams. 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. I haven’t seen or used anything quite like it before. Rather than me reading what you tweet, I read the stream that you have selected to read—your inbound stream. 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.

  There’s a lot I want to say about it, especially because I’ve said so little here, but there’s been so much to do getting it ready for launch that I haven’t had a spare second to do any proper writing. For now I just hope you’ll check it out (it’s free to download and free for the first week) and let me know what you think. In the coming days I’ll to do my best to organize my thoughts. There’s a lot of people right now thinking about touchscreen UI, machine learning, and future business models for online journalism, and I believe we’ve made substantial innovations in all three.

  Thank you to my incredible teammates: Michael Young, Ted Roden, Alexis Lloyd, Tracy Pesin, Hilary Mason, Dennis Kubes, Jeremie Miller, and literally everyone at bitly and the Betaworks family. News.me is very much a team effort but I think it’s safe to say we’re all proud of what we’ve done so far and tremendously excited for where to take it next!

  21 Apr 2011