Now, the right information gets more important than ever. Though there are several search engines and they are advancing to find a moderate result, it is still difficult to find what a user really wants. And furthermore people want to read a post or news which they are interested on.
So many internet users have used an RSS reader or an article-scrapping application. Instapper is one of famous applications in AppStore which easily enables a user to maintain news or other web posts. But the trend is changing.
Flipboard: the Start of a Personalized Magazine
iPad is entirely different from the other gadgets, especially from a cellular-phone. With its wide monitor, iPad is really starting to substitute paper magazines to e-magazines. But people don’t want a general magazine which are already distributed by Amazone Kindle or Zinio.
Flipboard is very clever in a way that it focuses on a user’s interests and behaviors based on SNS such as Twitter and Facebook. It has brought powerful responses from users only to change the structure of posts to a type of magazine. While Twitter and Facebook became tools for media and communication to share information, the expression method is not optimized as a personalized information channel. Flipboard found the niche that a SNS-user wants.
Zite: Intelligent Personalization Engine
Flipboard is interesting, but it only gives restricted information within SNS. Even though I really want technology articles or medical news, it is difficult to get those things from SNS. This is because the main objective of SNS is different from information-centric services.
So there is the other service to grow rapidly as a personalized magazine. If you want to get information according to your interest, you just allow your twitter account with Zite and check your interests. After this simple process, you can read the whole post and news which is edited as a magazine. As a user chooses topic from these recommended articles, the personalized engine becomes more accurate by knowing the right user’s interests.
News.me: Get Smart, Even Getting an E-mail Delivery
News.me provides information which several journalists or any other famous people have interests on. And there is another big difference compared to Zite. It delivers e-mail to a user who doesn’t have iPad.
This service also asks a user to permit to get contextual information at Twitter. And it screens follower data and posts. It sometimes provides a user with some interesting information like Stumble-upon.
These personalized magazines are commonly provided under an iPad. But it can be extended to another user without iPad. Most of all, those three services try to strengthen the power of an editor. At the same time, this kind of magazine services has a problem of intellectual property. If there is some objection from other players such as NY Times or Tech Crunch, the quantity of news will be reduced drastically. So it is very important for e-magazine service providers to form a partnership with the media. If they can maintain the alliance with media, they can take opportunities to get a user’s interests which are useful to provide an advertisement and to optimize a search engine.
As iPad and other tablet PCs are wide spread, e-magazines will maintain their position as a standard of a new trend.