The Daily Me newspaper concept has been around a long time and has been forgotten to a large extent as RSS readers and then social media streams have come to dominate.
It may seem no longer relevant and we’ve no indications that Apple could revive personalised news with its rumoured tablet announcement on Wednesday, but the startup iCurrent is launching its own stab at the concept today.
“The Daily Me hasn’t been delivered yet,” Ramana Rao, co-founder and chief executive of iCurrent, told me.
“It was a view of the future based on the promise of various capabilities that were coming out. It’s just been a question of when is the time you can actually assemble a solution that does strike a chord with people.”
ICurrent draws on 27,000 sources to build a personalised news page for users according to their interests.
Setting up can take a few minutes to make the service useful but simply involves users adding keywords.
Adding a word like tablet instantly produces a page on Apple speculation and tablet automatically becomes a channel under Technology.
Users can click on up and down arrows next to stories to indicate whether they find an article relevant and the software invites them to click on suggestions for what they might like more of.
This means the personalisation should become more and more relevant, with the aim of users only getting the latest developments on a particular subject that interests them.
“ICurrent stays tuned to where you’re at and it’s driving toward where you want to go with a subject,” said Mr Rao.
The service was launched in private beta in October and has won support from users in all the demographics, he said.
ICurrent is currently only a website with a daily personalised email mailout, but there are plans for an iPhone app and Facebook integration.
I found it useful in keeping me up to date on topics, but it is in a tough competition for my attention with social media alerts such as Twitter lists and Friendfeed and aggregation websites such as Techmeme and Google News. It also lacks real-time updates.
The idea of a Daily Me still appeals to me if the best and most relevant content from a range of premium sources could be delivered in a compelling design. ICurrent is too new to be able to achieve that right away and it lacks the comprehensive content deals needed to deliver the best of the web.
