This article was published on December 12, 2015

As personalized news evolves, Prismatic is closing its apps


As personalized news evolves, Prismatic is closing its apps

If you’re a user of the news aggregation apps from Prismatic, there’s some bad news – the company is closing its consumer-facing apps as of December 20.

In a blog post, the company said that in the four-year lifespan of the apps it had “learned content distribution is a tough business and (it had) failed to grow at a rate that justifies continuing to support our Prismatic News products.”

The iOS, Android and Web apps, and access the associated Interest Graph APIs will be cut off as of next Sunday, and the company advises you save any articles you want to keep to Pocket, email them to yourself or copy and paste the links somewhere else.

The news aggregation app business has evolved quickly. When Prismatic launched in wake of the iPad, the trend was for a magazine-like experience, and Flipboard is the only notable name still standing from that period.

Nowadays, the tech giants are aggregating the news for us with the help of human curators. Apple added a human-powered section to its News app on iOS this week and Twitter is gradually rolling out its Moments news feature, based on manually curated tweets, around the world.

As for Prismatic, the company lives on. It’s now focused on helping publishers and hedge funds boost revenue through its machine learning algorithms – you won’t find a single mention of its consumer offering on its homepage.

Writing the next chapter for Prismatic [Prismatic blog]

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