Thank you.

I’ve used it and read a lot of talk about the design. I’d be interested to learn how many people are using it daily, or even weekly.

Social news reading experiences are certainly interesting, and there is value to knowing what kind of stuff a group of friends is reading. As I am sure you know, a big problem in journalism (at least the spirit of it), is that so many people just consume news that resonates with what they already believe. I wonder if new media and social news stuff with “likes” and “recommendations” ends up providing false evidence that what one person thinks is accurate or worthy news is indeed so, since so many other people “liked” it.

Also, from what I have seen on Twitter, Facebook, YouTub, and various other digital social spaces – I wouldn’t trust the collective wisdom there to report what the weather was like yesterday. The Internet has given everyone a voice, and to be honest I feel at times that the majority of those voices are not qualified to speak on the matter. This is an interesting conundrum, since it is valuable to give everyone a voice but also necessary to know which voice to listen to. (And I don’t think voting things up or down works – for about a billion reasons that I won’t go into here.)

Ultimately, the mob is fickle and tends to focus only on the stories that appeal to the most base of socioeconomic needs. I trust certain individuals, not the masses.

And finally, as a bigger issue frequently brought up but seldom addressed, how much privacy has to be given up in order to achieve “better news reading experiences”? Of course a big problem comes with how we define “privacy”, since that word means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Anyway, good luck! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.