iPhone News Updated

Sharing Content on the iPhone: A Plea for Universal TwitterSharing Content on the iPhone: A Plea for Universal Twitter

Sharing Content on the iPhone: A Plea for Universal TwitterSharing Content on the iPhone: A Plea for Universal Twitter

One of my favorite iPhone apps is Instapaper, because it let’s me put a pin in something I want to read without leaving the bomb run of surfing for things that I might want to read when I have time later (ha!). I even warily bought the pricey version ($9.99) because the free one had so much promise, and little did I know that the best feature of the upgrade was a unique feature called tilt scroll which — which every other e-reader should do, by the way, but that is a screed for another day.

Then my favorite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie, incorporated a feature which leveraged Instapaper by storing any link in a Tweet to my account in one click — brilliant! Now I can plow through a gazzilion messages and vet the shared URLs later when I am in reading and not harvesting mode, on the iPhone or on the web.

But, there is still something wrong, I thought today, as I got my usual Saturday morning headache while reading the news on my iPhone. It has nothing to do with eye strain and everything to do with a condition you could call “filing clerk fatigue.” Content providers who have been sharp enough to bring me their news and information free and easy on the device of my choice still aren’t letting me put them in the round holes I want, by providing only square pegs.

What’s needed in every single news application — heck, why not music and video and whatever? — is an option to send a short URL of a piece of reading to one’s Twitter account. This accomplishes everything important in one fell swoop:

• It creates an instant share and recommend to every one of my Twitter followers, instead of the handful of contacts I to whom I might send  e-mail
• It make the content (and the brand) instantly viral in a hot gene pool.
• It accomplishes what the “save” option some apps has doesn’t: giving me a frictionless way to get back to something. There are a multitude of ways to get to Twitter, where I (and I suspect many others) spend a lot of time, and there is only one to return to the app on your iPhone to the exclusion of all else.
• Twitter becomes a vaster field of advocated content, with Instapaper becoming the digital combine harvester.

It is by no means a complete list but only application I have which gives me a Twitter option is AP’s Mobile news, which also lets you send to Facebook and text an article, as well as e-mail and save (see illustration). I don’t know for sure but this may be a feature new to version 2.0 just out in what the AP calls a “major” upgrade.

My New York Times and Wall Street Journal applications only let me “save” and e-mail. Bloomberg has e-mail but no save.

Publishers learned some time ago that forcing readers to come back to their sites was offensive to many of them, so viral distribution of content became a norm. Embeddable video is a great example of this: you project your brand and your content and make friends of friends of strangers just by letting a blogger use put your player on a post (and let it be shared again from there). It’s the same with any other content. I want it here, not there. Because.

Have I thought this completely through? Of course not. It’s a rant as I finish my Saturday coffee and reading and move on to a plethora of DIY activities I’m already scoping out. Where would the link go, for example? Perhaps a bespoke page which touts the various smartphone apps or paywall tiers of the publication as part of a freemium ecosystem. How could the URL itself connote the brand? Also, not my problem, but a quick Google search shows that many brands are already figuring out why it makes sense to do this, and how. How much engineering would it take? No idea. Want to leave in “save” and “email” anyway? Go ahead. It might also give you some good intel on what people prefer. Why Twitter? Well, if you have to ask …

I’d love to hear from reader abouts other applications begging for Twitter integration, and others that already do it.

[Thanks: http://www.wired.com]

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