New York Times previews its social-aware The Daily rival
updated 09:20 pm EST, Tue February 1, 2011
New York Times News.me to take on iPad Daily
The New York Times today gave an early look at its rough parallel to News Corp.'s imminent The Daily iPad app. News.me, co-developed by betaworks, would take more of its cues from Flipboard and curate content from Twitter. Along with formatting articles from the reader's own feed, the iPad reader alternative would see recommendations for those being followed and show what they might like, not necessarily what they're already reading.
URL shortener Bit.ly would track the stories and provide a quick jump to the top stories based on the most frequently read stories in the feed. Sharing would spread articles to Facebook, Twitter, e-mail or offline caching through Instapaper.
The newspaper and betaworks would be taking a gamble on the app. Flipboard is looking to being paid for content partnerships and ads, but News.me will scrape major paid content without ads and will require that readers pay to get access. It's not certain at this stage if it would involve a one-time purchase or if the project would lean on subscriptions, possibly using the iTunes subscription model expected tomorrow.
A go-live date hasn't been given out but may come soon. [via TechCrunch]
