Finding one place to go online to read all the news you’re most interested in would be like having a little bit of Blackbird’s treasure appear beside the coffee pot each morning. If you’re like me, both have so far been the stuff of legend, yet to make a single appearance. Can trove end our misfortunes?
Personal Picks
Trove is a blend of social networking, news discovery and aggregation. Articles collect under topics or Troves, pulled from 15,000 news sources. More than mathematics, curators for sharing news and determining what news is of the most value. Curators include the individual user, field experts, or selected friends. Connecting with Facebook and Twitter accounts allows Trove to make news recommendations culled from the feeds of people whose interests resemble yours.
Reducing Interference
As George Carlin once said, “Too many options: not healthy.” It’s quite impossible to sift through all the news sites for articles of interest. Social networks surround news we’d care about with far too much clutter. No one has the time to separate the gold from the garbage. If Trove makes it easier and quicker to find the stories each of us cares about, it will be a godsend.
This will depend upon the people who join the list of curators, of course, and connecting with others who share your preferences. Time will tell how effectively Trove manages to do so. However, the design is promising in its ability to accommodate very specific or broad topics. At launch, featured curators included the following:
- Bob Wise, former Governor of West Virginia and President of the Alliance for Excellent Education, on “Digital Learning”
- Vivek Wadhwa, academic and tech entrepreneur, on “Advancing Technologies”
- Spike Mendelsohn, former Bravo Top Chef contestant, on “Farm To Table”
- Zach Sims, Co-founder and CEO of Codecademy, on “Online Education”
- Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Senior Correspondent at The Washington Post, on “Afghan War”
- Robert Litan, Head of Research at Bloomberg BGOV, on “US Monetary Policy”
- The Young Turks hosted by Cenk Uygur, a politics news show with 1.4 million YouTube subscribers, on “Money in Politics”
- DoSomething.org, a not-for-profit for young people and social change with 2.4 million members, on “Celebs Gone Good”
- Science Magazine, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on “Top Science News”
- Aspen Institute, an educational and policy studies organization, on “Aspen Ideas: What We’re Reading”
- Stiff Jab, a literary fight magazine covering boxing and mixed martial arts on the East Coast, on “Boxing”
- Play-i, a start-up developing toy robots, on “Programming for Kids”
Trove is the newly developed, pivoting survivor of the Washington Post Co. purchase by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Previously WaPo Labs, the team regrouped to focus on Trove, a refurbished Social Reader – which had shown great promise as a social news discovery app (20 million users in the first year) until Facebook changed its algorithm.
Trove has rolled out on Apple devices. What say you, mateys? Does it drown out the noise and surface the real news?
Photo Credits
Trove
