News.me
Personalized news aggregator News.me has pulled its iPhone and iPad apps from the Apple App Store, citing an inability to comply with Twitter’s stringent new display requirements for tweets.
News.me uses Twitter data, including links your friends have tweeted, to generate its personalized list of news stories. In recent months, Twitter has placed more restrictions on third-party developers’ use of tweets and the company has created its own personalized news section called “Discover.”
“What it comes down to,” News.me General Manager Jake Levine writes, is “we don’t want to invest time and energy into an application that competes with a platform [Twitter] on which it relies.”
Instead, News.me will be focused on its more-successful daily email newsletter product, as well as reviving Digg as a popular social news aggregator.
Some other personalized news efforts that were buzzed-about a couple years ago have ceased.
Ongo, a paid product from major newspaper publishers, shuttered in May after failing to find a audience. News.me also had tried making users buy subscriptions at first, but later converted to a free product.
The Washington Post’s personalized news service, Trove, launched in 2011 as a consumer product but has since become more valuable as underlying technology to power other projects like the Post’s Social Reader Facebook app or Personal Post website section.
Other personalized news apps are still going strong. News360 and Zite have very effective iPad or smartphone products. CNN, which acquired Zite in 2011, recently began using its technology to power a new CNN Trends aggregation section. “There is a deep respect from me and the other CNN execs for the Zite team,” KC Estenson, CNN senior vice president and general manager of digital, told Dan Rowinski in a story published today.
Related: Browser extension Unpolitic.me will replace all political content with cat pictures (PandoDaily)
