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The Daily Beast website now offers a clever iOS app (Updated)
The Daily Beast website has been around since 2008. It's now owned by Newsweek/International Business Times IAC, focusing on politics and the arts. With a new free iOS app, readers get an easy-to-use look at the Daily Beast with a quick swipe feature that lets you skip what you don't like and read what you do like. The app also keeps stats about what type of news you are reading and makes suggestions. It doesn't provide full personalization like Zite, but the Daily Beast app does make sure you will get a relevant-to-you mix of news and features. When you launch the app up for the first time, you get a slowly rendered total of how many stories people have read and skipped for the day. When I want to read some news, that type of metadata is pretty much at the bottom of my list of priorities, so I'd like to see that feature dumped. Beyond the slow start, the app is actually pretty good, with highly readable photos and text. Once you've read an article, it is dimmed so you don't accidentally re-open it. Scrolling is smooth. Clicking on links takes you out of the app -- it would be far better to built in a browser so users are not shuttling back and forth between multiple apps. Scrolling down to the end of an article brings up the next one, and that's far better than having to go back to a main page. Whether you get the next article depends on the "force" of your scrolling, which might confuse some users. If you swipe to the left you get a "skip" message, and the next article appears. Daily Beast fans will certainly want this app, although news from The Daily Beast can also be added to a dedicated page in Zite, where I also read it. At the top right of The Daily Beast app is a summary of how many stories you have read and skipped, and what news category they are in, like politics or fashion entertainment for example. This is a clever app, but it needs some fine tuning to make it faster to launch. The Daily beast requires iOS 7.0 and is optimized for the iPhone 5.
Newsweek to drop print edition after December 31st, gives the digital future a warm hug
It's no secret that print media is on its way out, as many regional and niche publications have had to either find a path through the digital wilderness or fold completely. We're still not used to national publications facing that ultimatum, though, which makes Newsweek's fresh decision to drop its print edition after December 31st both unusual and a bellwether. Anyone still yearning for the magazine's content after the presses stop will have to turn to the purely digital Newsweek Global or its The Daily Beast sibling, no matter how attached they are to the outlet's 80-year history with paper. The explanation for the cutoff remains a familiar story: print readership is dying on the vine and expensive to maintain, while web and tablet adoption is growing quickly enough that Newsweek believes it can make the switch without taking a long-term financial hit. Whether or not the transition works, it's evident the periodical knows its identity must be wrapped around an online presence -- figuratively, not literally.
Facebook admits hiring PR firm to smear Google
It seems like the ongoing rivalry between Facebook and Google has taken a turn for the subversive. Last night, a spokesman for the social network confirmed to the Daily Beast that Facebook paid a top PR firm to spread anti-Google stories across the media and to encourage various outlets to examine allegations that the Mountain View company was violating user privacy. The PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, even offered to help blogger Chris Soghoian write a critical op-ed piece about Social Circle -- a service that allows Gmail users to access information on so-called "secondary connections," or friends of their friends. Social Circle, in fact, seems to have been at the epicenter of Facebook's smear campaign. In a pitch to journalists, Burson described the tool in borderline apocalyptic terms: "The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day-without their permission." Soghoian thought that Burson's representatives were "making a mountain out of a molehill," so he decided to prod them about which company they might be working for. When Burson refused to spill the beans, Soghoian went public and published all of the e-mails sent between him and the firm. USA Today picked up on the story, before concluding that any claims of a smear campaign were unfounded. The Daily Beast's Dan Lyons, however, apparently forced Facebook's hand after confronting the company with "evidence" of its involvement. A Facebook spokesman said the social network hired Burson to do its Nixonian dirty work for two primary reasons: it genuinely believes that Google is violating consumer privacy and it also suspects that its rival "may be improperly using data they have scraped about Facebook users." In other words, their actions were motivated by both "altruistic" and self-serving agendas, though we'd be willing to bet that the latter slightly outweighed the former. Google, meanwhile, has yet to comment on the story, saying that it still needs more time to wrap its head around everything -- which might just be the most appropriate "no comment" we've ever heard.
