This just in — there’s a new app that shares what’s going on in the world in a way that hopes to change how you get your news altogether. Say sayonara to statuses, ta ta to tweets and buh-bye to your blog’s basic bullets. Now it’s all about Inside’s update.
The freshly-launched Inside employs a staff to read news all day and write it up in easy-to-digest snacks for you to scroll through on your smartphone. The snacks, aka Inside‘s “updates,” each have around 300 characters, approximately 40 words and up to 10 essential facts for every story.
Updates are categorized in a main feed with the usual suspects, think: /politics, /music, /design. More current topics are tagged with hashtag-reminiscent versions better suited for breaking news, like /roosevelthighshooting. Click a category to swipe through more stories on the same topic, choose to “Follow” a topic that swipes your fancy or click through to read more from the original source.
Inside doesn’t just fill your feed with items it thinks is interesting, it’ll give you a look at everything under the All Updates tab with the option to customize a personal feed over time. Just click the thumbs up or thumbs down on different articles to create a Pandora-ful playlist of news tailored for you. News-reading is fun again!
At first scroll, we are big fans and interested to see how Inside’s algorithm woos us and our news junkie ways over time. The app brings together so many of our favorite features from our current go-tos and offers a couple improvements. Having double the tweet length-space in each update means you can read more (with Inside hoping their more is all you need) of a story without having to switch over to Safari. We’re geeking out about customizing our Updates too — hit the Topics tab in the app and tell us you didn’t get lost in picking what to follow for a few minutes. We name-dropped Pandora, but really Inside is like if our CNN and Twitter apps threw a party featuring DJ Old-and-New Digg, Circa catering and theSkimm schmoozing.
Will you give Inside a try? If you already have it downloaded, share your thoughts on it with us! And tell us your favorite app for news in the comments below.