Newspaper of the Future, Ex-Googler Style
Calling itself “The World’s First Personalized Newspaper,” Hawthorne Labs has released Apollo on iPad only ($2.99 and going to $4.99). Founded by Google ex-coders for the most part, Apollo offers a cleaner, more laid-out version of NetVibes, Google News, AllTop, Newser, Yahoo!, HuffPo/Drudge – basically any of the news aggregators but with related clustering and more social modularity.
We’re looking forward to testing out, but check out the well-designed layouts below and the YouTube video (after the jump with its bumpy classical/techno, engineer-produced beat). These kind of news tech builds are somewhat generic in structure – an Apple, Facebook, Google, NYT or Demand Media should be able to duplicate, as it’s UI/UX with a good web crawler/recommendation engine.
However, what we still find missing, is who is aggregating the feeds? What is the POV that makes it interesting. If the recommendation engines and content clusters are dead-on for high-level, online readers then the results will be good…for that reader, but what about others with less disciplined RSS/news browsing. Who are the leaders or tastemakers of online content consumption that, frankly, are worth following.
Who is the voice of the NYT – we know the voice of Dealbook? Who is the voice of the LAT – we know the voice of Company Town?