iPad and iPhone version of The Economist free for paper subscribers

The Economist is one of three paper magazines I still read.  The other two are soccer magazines.   I haven't tried this out yet, but I just received this in my inbox.   I'm curious to try it out and see if will reduce the number of paper publications I read to two.  And as a subscriber I love the model that it's included in my subscription.

Dear S Olechowski

I am delighted to announce the global launch of The Economiston iPhone®, iPad™ and iPod touch®.

From today, the full print edition will be available to download for reading on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch by 9pm London time (4pm New York time) each Thursday.

We have reformatted the newspaper to make the most of these devices while retaining the familiar feel of The Economist, with all the articles, charts, maps and images from each week's print edition.

All articles are fully cached for reading even when you don't have an internet connection. And we have included our audio edition so you can listen to every article, read by professional newscasters, with easy switching between reading and listening.

Full access to The Economist via the apps is included with your current subscription. 

To get The Economist on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, simply download our free app for your device, then log in using your Economist online e-mail address and password. 

Yours sincerely

Oscar Grut Managing director, digital editions

Engaging your users with email

I forgot to mention in my quick thoughts on Summify, but was reminded by a user comment, that one of the things I liked about Summify is that they send you an email digest every day of some of the more interesting items in your stream.  I'm secretly glad I forgot, as it's worth another mentioning in a separate post.

I think in the past, too many newsreaders made the mistake of thinking "my users don't want this via email, that's why this application exists" and although that might be true for a subset of users, it certainly isn't true for everyone.

To make an obvious statement, people use different media differently.   That is, the frequency in which someone checks email is different than the frequency in which they read their Twitter stream  ( I certainly know people who check Twitter more than they check email, and I've had DM or Facebook message conversations that have replaced email - but that's not really the point).  I think generally users need to be able to decide which media alerts are interrupt driven, and which ones are meant for background occasional browsing.

For certain applications that are vying for your attention, I think engaging your users via email to spur a return to your application on an clear opt-out basis has become totally acceptable, and for me anyway, is generally preferred.   Twitter and Facebook have largely paved the way for making this the de-facto method, by alerting you via email when there are new followers or friends, or Direct Messages, and allowing you to opt-out if you don't want them. I probably wouldn't know about any of this activity if it weren't delivered by email.  I certainly wouldn't want this info delivered as a tweet itself for the Twitter examples, anyway.

Twitter notification by email

I don't think it was always this way.  It used to be considered a bit spammy to make an application email it's users without consent, but I think it's become somewhat accepted, again, as long as there is a clear opt-out of "I don't ever want to get this email again" right in the first email.

Many applications have taken the same tack with iPhone push notifications, and that's something I don't like.   I really don't want my phone beeping every time someone writes on my Facebook wall, but if I remember correctly, this is the default behavior.

The general point here is, think carefully about how to drive continued engagement with your users, and although with any notification medium you will always walk a thin line between engagement and being spammy, don't be afraid of email.  It's still the primary way most people communicate.

Quick thoughts on Summify, a simple and fast social news aggregator

Continuing the thread here of next generation of content readers, I wanted to give some brief thoughts on Summify, and browser-based newsreader that promises to algorithmically "cure your unread item guilt" by presenting you stories posted by your social networks in Twitter and Facebook, as well as meshing in your subscriptions from Google Reader.

Now, "unread item guilt" is something I never had.  I was always happy consuming feeds on the come, never being the least bit anxious about the bold black type on the left of my browser window.  But I can assure you this is not the norm.  At FeedBurner, we spent a whole lotta time making sure in the course of processing billions of feed items that we never mistakenly changed an item in a way that would mark it "unread" again in the thousands of different feed readers that calculated what made an item changed in various different ways.

There really are two types of people in the world, those who care about the unread count in their newsreaders and sane people, and although I'm kidding, anyone who subscribes to more than 100 feeds or follows more than 100 accounts on Twitter just is not going to get to read all the items that come in from that stream.

Summify tries to solve this by looking at both your items and your contacts (or friends) and presenting you a river of news, ranking on thinks like number of retweets, facebook likes and shares, and direct shares from your contact list.

It's still in private beta, so I'm guessing they haven't hit any scaling walls yet, but as of right now, the UI is very snappy and useable in a way that many ajax-heavy UIs are not, which is encouraging.

Where I've recently talked a lot about how twitter is protocol with a payload, and that we're going to start seeing a new crop of news readers that unpack this payload, Summify falls squarely into this category.   Much like Twitter for iPad, Summify unpacks short URLs in Twitter and displays a parsed version of the destination web page (or perhaps matches the content from the feed, I can't really tell) right inside Summify application.

In fact, if you only connect Summify to your Twitter account, I find it slightly more useful than #newtwitter for browsing content.

Although you can connect Summify to Google Reader and have it pull in your subscriptions from Google Reader, I don't recommend doing this right now, simply because there currently is no way to undo this.  There's a pane that clearly says this is coming soon, but if you have hundreds of feeds in Google Reader like I do, these feeds will soon overrun your Twitter stream, and frankly doesn't add a lot over using Google Reader by itself in the "Recommended Items" view.

In short though, I really like the direction Summify is going here, mostly because it's simple, useful, and fast. I think they should keep it that way and spend a lot of time keeping it fast as they scale. If it stays simple, stays useful, and stays fast, I can see this being a go to browser UI for news reading.

News on the iPad: innovating on presentation

There's a great scene in Pulp Fiction that can only be found in the Director's Cut where Mia Wallace asks Vincent Vega if he is an Elvis man or a Beatles man.  I'm paraphrasing, but her point was that you can only be one or the other, really, and that one preference tells you a lot about a person.

I think the same is true for magazines and newspapers.   I have always loved magazines and hated newspapers.  Magazines are shiny and attractive to me, newspapers are dull and ugly.  And that effects how I enjoyed them.  As such, reading news in a newspaper has never been interesting to me.

I think that's why news on the iPad has me excited:  newspaper content is presented real time in the form of digital magazines.

As a function of my job, I spend a lot of time looking at content in various generic newsreaders, and I won't really touch too much on those here.  Because competition has mainly come from social media platforms, we haven't seen a lot of total innovation on presentation from these readers in some time.

That's why I find the newsreaders from the news agencies or media companies on the iPad interesting: they are creating newsreaders which are innovative in presentation, and in my opinion, very useful and engaging.   The clever and efficient use of image and video resources succeeds where previous attempts at general standardization have failed.  Certainly we've been able to mark up feed content like this for some time, but most news readers and feed processing platforms haven't been able to make smart decisions on what to do with such tags.

For instance, the BBC News reader is great, feels like a digital magazine to me, and draws you in first with a standard headline + picture.  The content itself has inline video that just works on the iPad platform, and it just seems really easy to browse the news and share it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the publishers which never had a printed newspaper are the ones that aren't encumbered by that format, and are the most innovative.  I've mentioned the BBC, but Thomson-Reuters has a great app as well.  In one view, you just start with pictures and jump to the content.

So how do the newspapers do in this endeavor?  Well, it certainly varies.  My favorite news app is probably the USATODAY app, which still looks like it's paper copy, but is a lot more interactive and, well useful.  I'd note that almost all of these things immediately ask for your permission to get your location and try to localize as much as they can.  USATODAY does this with it's weather, AP gets a bit more hyper-local with the news stories themselves.

The WSJ, well, looks like the WSJ - why they took this route, I am not sure since I think their original iPhone app was a bit more innovative in this regard.  I guess they are just hoping that the old men on the train who read the WSJ will see this iPad app as a straight replacement.  For their users, the snippet on the front page is part of their brand and I suppose they are staying with what works, but still, it doesn't seem to utilize the iPad platform at all.

Again, back to my original premise - I'm excited here because some of these news agencies are turning what was traditionally the fodder for boring newspaper presentation into the arguably sexier presentation of a magazine - so I really hope that this space continues to innovate along these lines.