Yahoo launches news aggregation and summary app 'News Digest' for iOS
In tandem with its keynote at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo announced 'News Digest,' a new iOS app that aggregates, condenses and delivers the day's top news to users twice a day.
News Digest, currently limited to iPhone and iPod touch, puts a twist on the two-times-a-day news delivery format that has in some ways been usurped by the Internet's instant and always-on coverage.
"We wanted Yahoo News Digest to revisit a content format that when read, led you to a sense of completion and conclusiveness, much like reading the newspaper did," Yahoo's product manager for mobile and emerging products Nick D'Aloisio wrote in a Tumblr post. D'Aloisio is the creator of Summly, a summarization and artificial intelligence technology used in a corresponding app, which was purchased by Yahoo last year.
Taking lessons learned from Summly, News Digest will offer up algorithmic summaries as well as editorial selection of relevant news articles.
At the heart of the app are so-called "atoms," which can be anything from article summaries, infographics, maps, videos, photos and more. Each story may contain any of these visual elements that supposedly help readers more efficiently consume content.
Aside from the background technology, News Digest offers two news roundups delivered in the morning and the evening. Each digest includes nine stories with associated atoms, while a countdown timer denotes how long it will take for the next digest to arrive.
News Digest is available for free as an 11MB download from the iOS App Store.
News Digest, currently limited to iPhone and iPod touch, puts a twist on the two-times-a-day news delivery format that has in some ways been usurped by the Internet's instant and always-on coverage.
"We wanted Yahoo News Digest to revisit a content format that when read, led you to a sense of completion and conclusiveness, much like reading the newspaper did," Yahoo's product manager for mobile and emerging products Nick D'Aloisio wrote in a Tumblr post. D'Aloisio is the creator of Summly, a summarization and artificial intelligence technology used in a corresponding app, which was purchased by Yahoo last year.
Taking lessons learned from Summly, News Digest will offer up algorithmic summaries as well as editorial selection of relevant news articles.
At the heart of the app are so-called "atoms," which can be anything from article summaries, infographics, maps, videos, photos and more. Each story may contain any of these visual elements that supposedly help readers more efficiently consume content.
Aside from the background technology, News Digest offers two news roundups delivered in the morning and the evening. Each digest includes nine stories with associated atoms, while a countdown timer denotes how long it will take for the next digest to arrive.
News Digest is available for free as an 11MB download from the iOS App Store.
Comments
I still won't touch Yahoo! mail or anything else, but I've been using their news app and just downloaded this one. It looks great and I use the other one daily; even over Google news.
They hit a home run with Yahoo Weather. I was so impressed with that app that I will definitely give this one a try....
WHEN IT'S AVAILABLE IN CANADA!!!!
I really miss Summly. You could choose which news source you wanted from many newspapers around the world.
It had a nice quick summary in a line or two or the articles.
Then you could view it more or read the entire article.
Another app Yahoo acquired and then killed is Kitcam. An amazing camera App for iOS. Also killed and not all the features moved to Flickr.
Basically if Yahoo is buying a great App, trust it will die a useless death.
If they did that, Yahoo! would have to grow up a little bit.
thanks yahoo. along with all the other apps of yours i don't use, i look forward to not using this one as well.
And thanks for the zero-contribute comment. What do you do exactly for the betterment of society again?
I'd actually like Yahoo to wake up and become relevant again, and I could untangle myself from f-ing Google.