USA Today has launched Newsdeck, a site that aggregates the top news stories from the paper’s site. Each topic of news has an individual widget on the site with links to news stories. Currently the site features stories on 8 different topics, including “News,” “Money,” “Life,” and more.
Each widget allows you to auto scroll down with your mouse for more headlines. You can also flip the widget and navigate between USA Today’s top stories and most popular stories. USA Today says they are looking to test products like this on the web to see what users really need from a news site when it comes to finding headlines and top stories.
Newsdeck does present headlines in a easy to use interface but I’m not sure if people will use it in the browser. USAToday’s site also features top headlines, although in a different interface. The site is similar to the New York Times’ Skimmer product, which lets you skim the online headlines of the paper. USA Today also recently launched an iPhone app and Android App and has seen a total of 1.88 million downloads of its mobile apps. Currently, USA Today’s iPhone app is the second most popular free news app, behind the New York Times’ app.
Very nice!
looks too heavy for me.
http://asterbuzz.com … lot easier on the iphone.
I don’t see why that’s news worthy.
There should be permalink to customised page, like news.php?city=NewYork. So that we need not login whatsoever.
This will probably be useful for news junkies and readers from USA Today. It’s a cool concept though. They should white label this service. But there is an easier way.. just feed it into Twitter!
- Darren at AdExcel dot Com
I agree with your assessment. Beyond how it plays on a handheld app, single-source news aggregation seems rather tepid in a browser.
But the major players certainly have caught the aggregation bug!
Hm. It short of reminds be of Alltop and iGoogle. I really like the scrolling, but I also really like my news to have a date and time, otherwise I’m not sure if it’s still relevant. Also, the design could be less flashy and more on the content. The blue isn’t that pleasing. Also, highlighting the story headline should bring up the first paragraph of the store, the author, and the date and time it was published (the the quick preview feature on Bing).
Yuck. My comment is littered with typos. There should be a way to delete and edit my comments on Techcrunch as well as receive an email when someone replies. Thumbs up / thumbs down next to each comment would be nice too, sort of like how seomoz.org does it.
I feel the same way sometimes. There’s probably a startup working on this problem right now LOL
Already done by some startups, see Disqus and others…
News headlines on a page, very well implemented, looks great, save people a bunch of time, and help you separate “the signal from the noise”. I like it, an interesting potential competitor.
Beta Comment.
We think that is quite useful for such an informative news site to do that
Widgets man, whoda’ thunk?
Great work USA Today, this is definitely the way to go -providing the opportunity at a glance to see what’s happening without the need for ads.
Sounds like a great idea, and it’s good to see that USA Today is looking at ways to attract readers digitally and interactively. But I wonder if perhaps this aggregator could be improved with a customization option? Some people might be more interested in, say, business news than generic headline news. And it could be made a social media utility by perhaps allowing growing companies (e.g. DubLi) to virally grow there, with Facebook style ‘I like this’ icons to further identify what a particular consumer wants.
Just my two cents’ worth…
this is definitely the way to go
I really like the new style but two things:
1. It won’t work out because no ads…no ads, no money
2. Didn’t anyone push the feedback button? You end up on a crappy feedback form with technical issues. And why doesn’t my email address fit in the box? #fail
Horrible interface compared to popurls.
About 2 years too late. Gannett = Deadpool
I like where USAToday is going with this idea. Hopefully this is a start of them rolling out new products for consumption by the younger generation who want their news in different formats….rather than their standard sections on the site.
Good job and Good start USAToday…keep these beta applications coming!
How do they decide if a story is top or bottom? comments? page views?
If you’re looking for a technology news aggregator that uses Twitter to rank stories, try:
http://tfeeder.com/
Check out ThyNews http://thynews.com. It’s the same concept but easily customizable with virtually any news source (blogs, etc) around the web. Check out a demo screencast here http://bit.ly/thynews-demo
We’ve just developed a “Deck Reader” for the iPhone and we’re looking for content. Our Deck reader totally bypasses the brower/website model of course and is 10X fast to use. Anybody interested?
Hey all, we have just rolled out a new version of the NewsDeck beta!
We’ve improved scrolling – giving the user more control.
We’ve added Most Commented and Most Recommended options to each deck. Click on the menu icon in the upper right corner of the deck.
We’ve added a new method for feedback (click on the tab at the top). This will also make the feedback more transparent – you will be able to view other comments.
We’ve switched the first deck to accurately reflect our website homefront content…and behind the scenes we’ve made a bunch of changes to the code that will allow us to add customization in presentation and content.