News.me, the social news service built on top of Twitter (and Facebook), today announced it is killing its curation apps for iPhone and iPad. The company is blaming Twitter for the move and says it wants to focus on its Digg efforts instead.
The company explains Twitter recently started competing with News.me, but it’s the social network’s new Display Requirements, which it says are going to be too difficult for it to implement with its current resources, that tipped the scales. “Here’s what it comes down to,” says News.Me’s Jake Levine, “we don’t want to invest time and energy into an application that competes with a platform on which it relies.”
News.me first launched for the iPad back in April 2011 and started using an algorithm to pull in popular news shared by your friends (and your friends’ friends) on both Twitter and Facebook. News.me’s algorithm ranked links based on whether the company thought they were newsworthy, how many of your friends shared them, and how many users clicked on them across the Web. A year later, in March 2012, it arrived on the iPhone. At the time of writing, News.me for iPhone and News.me for iPad are no longer available for download.
Meanwhile, Digg for iOS is available on the official Apple App Store (iPad support arrived less than a month ago). News.me says it will continue to support its iOS apps for users that have already downloaded them, and the News.me email service will trudge on, unaffected by today’s news.
Betaworks, the company behind Bit.ly and News.me, acquired Digg in July with promises that it will be revamped to be different than Reddit. That’s exactly what happened some three months ago, and now “already over 4 million people have checked out the new Digg,” according to Levine. “But what’s more shocking is that usage of the iPhone and iPad apps are close to surpassing web, and those apps didn’t exist 12 weeks ago!”
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Levine also says News.me wants to “take what we learned from News.me to build the Internet’s best social news applications” and keep “helping people find the best stories on the Internet.” Given the Twitter changes and Digg’s potential, using the News.me brand to achieve those goals just doesn’t make sense anymore.
See also – Developers surprised by Oct 5th deadline rush to comply with Twitter’s new tweet Display Requirements and Why IFTTT being forced to remove its Twitter triggers is a red alert for developers
Image credit: Griszka Niewiadomski
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