It isn't rocket science, but it is a really neat use of the API. I've moved away from my feed reader and spend more time on Tweetdeck recently, so this is something of a halfway house - friend-fuelled RSS if you like. Anyway, I was looking around at all the people who had remembered to buy a newspaper and wishing that I'd printed my Twitter Times. I don't think that this is what it was designed for, but I wish it could turn into that. A few months ago I made up some things that I thought the magazine industry could do, inspired by some famous magazine or other ceasing publication, including this
People like magazines (ok not enough to make them profitable). If you are using a site every day to check a few favourite feeds, then surely it should be able to learn enough from what you, other people like you, your friends, etc read to be able to put a pretty decent package of content together that you haven't read. And then your subscription could offer you a couple of printed copies per year (printed specifically for you, content specific to you that it knows you haven't read). (Perhaps when you book a train ticket you could be reminded to order it for delivery the day of travel) - the printed version becomes the personalised collectors edition. There's not really been a way of making 'your friends' recommendations' a physical product like this, although most people have pretty good printing technology in their houses. OK you can print your Google Reader, but when you look at what something like Twitter Times could be when coupled with something like Ben Terrett and Russell Davies's Newspaper Club, which can provide the design templates and printing (I think that's what they're up to), or Marcus Brown turning his blog into a book then there are some exciting post digital niche publishing opportunities around, and one excited potential customer here
To be fair I don't know if Rupert himself is to be congratulated for the Wall St Journal's iPhone application, but as well as being a great execution of the mobile news genre, it also shows that value of paid content online for the future of a newspaper. As I've mentioned before, it is unrealistic to think that popular news sites are ever going to be able to build a subscription model. That horse has long since bolted. There is a possibility that they can generate revenue through mobile access to news, as mobile is still an area where we are used to incremental payments for better services and functionality (as in the iPhone itself). The problem is that few phones make reading content (particularly content that includes pictures, links, flash video, etc) particularly pleasant. So you would be paying for the convenience of consuming the content anywhere, although it is actually relatively inconvenient to do so.
Much better if you are looking at offering the same content on a mix of free and paid media to have the always-on but difficult to use in depth medium available for free, and charge for the one that people will want to spend more time with. As the WSJ has maintained its subscription model (more because it could, having unique and high quality content rather than having any particular insight into the future of newspapers) it has been able to do that.
Although thinking about it that the same could have been said about print and online versions 8 years ago....
(photo courtesy)
