Newser - A news aggregator you don’t need

By Vivek | August 6th, 2007 at 10:27 am ET         

Next time you plan to launch a startup remember not to solve too many problems at the launch itself. While many people understand the pitfalls there are always few who don’t. Latest example is Michael Wolff who has launched a news aggregation site - Newser.com. 

The new concept presented by Newser, is that it delivers “the day?s most important and most talked about stories from the 100 top news sources?, all on one page. You basically have nine-squares, with news content inside them, to start with. If you want, you can get as many as 21 squares. But that is it. Don’t worry that is not the end of the app. Just click on any square and Newser works in a drill down fashion to deliver related stories and stuff. Sounds great. Sure it does except for few major issues.

Newser is trying to cover way too many news categories to start with - Politics, Technology, Business…… For each news square, Newser?s editors distill articles and opinion pieces to deliver the best. I think that would be a substantial overhead for Newser given it has to do the same across quite a few content areas throughout the day. Not to mention that is a dead boring job for editors where users don’t even come to know who is behind the service.

Besides that, Newser algorithm tries to recommend related news articles for the one you are viewing. I think the recommendations are way off for now. Check the snapshot below for the recommendations on the news about Fake Steve Jobs Blogger Outed. To point out the specific issues in this case - all the recommendations for the news are from regular news sites while the post is about a blog/blogger. And not to mention each one of them is irrelevant. This is yet another side-effect of trying to cover wide variety of content areas.

Everything aside, who is interested just in the “the day?s most important and most talked about stories”? At least I am not.