The folks behind News.me announced that they’re closing their iOS App Store doors on Wednesday, directing attention away from their curated news app on iPhone and iPad and re-directing focus on Digg curation. They say it’s a direct result of Twitter’s increasingly stringent third-party guidelines and competition with developers in the curation space.
In other words, another Twitter app bites the dust.
“Here’s what it comes down to: we don’t want to invest time and energy into an application that competes with a platform on which it relies,” News.me wrote on its blog.
The company said it will continue to support existing apps that users have downloaded, but it will no longer be available in the App Store. It explained that new display guidelines from Twitter announced this summer meant News.me would either have to devote considerable efforts to make its app compliant, or it would have to pull the plug and re-focus elsewhere. The company has picked the latter, a decision that isn’t the first of its kind and likely won’t be the last.
News.me is an app that pulls links surfacing in a user’s Twitter and Facebook streams and aggregates them for a pleasant, curated reading experience. In other words, it wants to show you what your friends are reading and what are the must-reads of the day.
The app has an interesting history, in that it was originally created by developers at the New York Times as a way to monitor the most interesting news coming out of social networks. The people behind the app eventually formed a partnership with Betaworks, the New York-based incubator, creator of Bit.ly and recent purchaser of Digg, which eventually acquired News.me. So the News.me staff said they would be re-focusing their efforts on Digg, an interesting turn of events for the re-emerging social platform.
