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Toronto - Imagine receiving a daily magazine that learns a
person's interests and then delivers only the most relevant content to them,
including local news.
Editions, a new iPad app released last week by AOL, even
includes reminders about birthdays. It marks the company's foray into
personalised news, a space already crowded with competitors such as Flipboard,
Zite and The Daily.
Billed as a Magazine That Reads You, Editions aggregates
content from thousands of websites and delivers personalised information once a
day with local news and weather. It includes a table of contents and a magazine
cover.
"It solves information overload in a holistic
way," said David Temkin of AOL. "It's your personal daily briefing.
It tells you not only what you say you're interested in, but also what's
happening in the world around you."
Users can select from 15 sections including business,
technology, sports and travel. Each section is further personalised based on
tagged keywords, as well as data collected from Facebook and Twitter.
The app has been praised for its slick design and use of
local news - but critics complain that it only delivers news once daily.
Others complain that the app simply forwards users to the
original news, rather than pulling the content within the app, leading to a
hodgepodge experience and making it difficult to read offline.
"It's definitely something we're looking at. It's a
question of how do you do that in a way that's publisher friendly. Everyone's
got advertising and that's part of their business model," said Temkin.
"We don't want to be in a position where we're simply
pulling people's text, and displaying it without ads. Some of our competitors
have made that mistake and that's not where we're going."
Temkin said Editions plans to introduce ads to its platform,
but first wants to get a sense of how people use it and where it might fit so
it doesn't detract from the reading experience.
Editions by AOL is available as a free download from Apple's
US App Store, and is scheduled to launch in Britain and Canada in two months.
