Clipped — More News With Less Noise
As Facebook and Twitter become de facto news services, it’s hard to keep up with the endless flow of information. As a result, a bustling industry of curation and clipping apps have sprouted to help manage the deluge of stories. Clipped is one of them, offering an interesting twist to the typical clip-and-read-later strategy.
What’s the App?
Clipped, available for free on both iOS and Android, is a news app that finds the most important stories of the day and summarizes each one with a set of bullet points. It connects to your Facebook or Twitter to pull the stories from an array of major sources. Then it creates feed of bullets, showing you the point of articles you care about.
When you click on each headline, the feed displays a clean, elegant layout for further reading. The result is a nicely uncluttered summary — without ads, sign-ups or related links that often distract your focus. If you like what you read, you can share the summary on Facebook and Twitter. The simple take on mobile news is valuable: bullet points create a quick list to get the facts of the day. In an age where information comes fast and furious — Internet, TV, mobile and social media — Clipped gives a rapid-fire way to fit the tempo of the times.
You’ll Want It If…
You’re a newshound and need a faster method to scan stories. The bullet point method gives a fair amount of accuracy. It’s also great if you just want a snapshot of headlines and relevant points, or if you need a quick tool to keep informed on news developments.
It’s Not My Thing — What Else Ya Got?
Clipped doesn’t just grab headlines, it makes them too. Created by 15-year-old high school student Tanay Tandon, the app helps him research and prepare for his school’s debate team. He created the algorithm to scan through stories and then worked on the project in his spare time to release it for a larger audience.
I use it to scan over articles,” he said. “If I like an article, I have to go back and read the whole thing.”
His after-hours project has great potential, and the algorithm has powerful applications beyond just summaries. But Clipped has a few issues to iron out. Despite the connections to Facebook and Twitter, it doesn’t really do any curation — it only pulls from major sources, instead of scouring social media for articles relevant to your interests. If you want curation, competitor Flipboard is still king.
There’s also no link to the original article, so if you want to read further, you’re out of luck. In addition, the bullet-point feature is rather limited: it only scans fact-heavy stories instead of denser analysis and opinion pieces, foregoing a valuable aspect of journalism in general. But Tandon is working on improvements, making Clipped an app to keep your eye out for. The summarizing algorithm, once finessed, may find its way into other apps before long.