Thoughts on Facebook Paper, Yahoo! News Digest, and Internet news

Virtually all of my news comes from the Internet, and virtually all of my time on the Internet is now spent reading news in one form or another. A lot of people are this way, and in the past few years, there’s been a great market push for new apps focused on culling Internet sources and creating customized news feeds for the user.

Flipboard might be one of the most popular and enduring apps to come out of this movement. It does a visually appealing job of mashing news content together. Google Currents was pretty good, but it’s presently being phased out in favor of Google Play Newsstand, a more diverse but less direct app for news consumption.

RSS, an old favorite for power users looking to get direct updates from blogs, has slowly been dying out. Google shut down its venerable Google Reader platform after it realized it couldn’t be monetized. Not only was the web platform well-executed, but it plugged in seamlessly into many excellent reader apps, like Reeder for iOS and OS X. Now that Reader’s gone, Feedly seems to have taken the helm, allowing easy import of Reader data into its new platform. Apps like Reeder had to be updated to work with new RSS backends, and while Reeder for iOS 7 is one of the best apps around, Reeder for OS X has yet to see the same update.

So I guess it’s no surprise that Facebook wanted to get in on the action. A few weeks ago now, Facebook released Paper, a standalone app with a focus on news consumption and design. It got a lot of positive press at its release, but I wonder what sort of user retention the app is seeing. The app, though at #1 on the App Store for some time, is no longer even in the Top 100. For comparison, Facebook’s main app is #7, Snapchat sits at #10, and Twitter follows at #29. Paper currently sits at #105, between Weather Underground and Word Puttz.

Paper is pretty, but maybe not practical.

I’ll echo what many others said: Paper is beautiful. At times, anyways. Its design has a basis in gestures, smooth transitions, thin typefaces, and content consumption. For the time being, Facebook Paper is ad-free, something to celebrate given that my mobile Facebook News Feed now seems to be 40% sponsored posts.

But the veneer of modern, flat design language (and a generally extreme departure from the format of Facebook’s main app) can’t cover up the unsubstantial functionality of the app. It isn’t sure what it wants to be. It could have been a pure news sourcing app, but Facebook decided to inject friend activity into the feed. It’s only understandable. Paper makes the content of Facebook a bit more appealing, but seeing each post as a large card scrolling horizontally at the bottom of the screen isn’t the most efficient way of getting around.

 

Three mentions of Fast Company, one title, two different cut-off introductions… where does the eye go?

The news functionality, while pleasant enough, is underwhelming. Facebook has various sections a user can add to his or her Paper, some with names like “Enterprise” and “Tech” and others with more flair like “Score” (sports) and “Flavor” (culinary news and recipes). But upon selecting any one of these sections, news is presented in a somewhat awkward manner that screams “pulled from Facebook”.

Pictures and articles coexist in one long feed of recent news stories deemed significant. News stories are first presented like you’d see on your News Feed: Typically a little blurb about a story, followed by a boxed link with the actual article headline. This becomes distracting, as it seems like there are always two headlines to read, visually separated on the screen. Tapping the headline just opens up a fullscreen mobile browser to the article online. This isn’t all that different from how RSS readers do it, but RSS has the advantage of displaying at least part of the article in plain text before sending the user to a mobile site. In addition, some of the sites Facebook highlights don’t have mobile page layouts, often making it difficult to enjoy the news story without fuss.

So, Paper is a nice looking app with good intentions, and I think it deserved a lot of the praise it got, if only for demonstrating that Facebook’s designers could create something completely different and modern with a focus on content over advertising. Ultimately though, I wonder how many are returning to the app regularly to consume news. It seems like the designers only took the idea partway. The interface is new, but the stream of news posts isn’t anything new or remarkable.

Yahoo! News Digest follows similar design cues, but it puts the headlines front and center.

Contrast Paper with another app, Yahoo! News Digest. It received some fanfare with it launched shortly after the new year, but since then, it’s also gotten very little press, and I couldn’t find it anywhere in the App Store’s Top 200. However, after downloading it back in January, this is an app I have used twice daily without fail.

Yahoo purchased Summly, a nifty news-condensing technology created by a teenager, a few months earlier, and this is the first app to make use of it. Each day at 8am and 6pm EST, the app serves up anywhere from six to ten top news stories, kept usually to two short paragraphs, with links to further reading posted at the bottom. News Digest is driven by a very similar, though more angular and extreme, flat user interface. It’s unforgivingly skimpy on content. There’s hardly an interface to speak of — while there are a few menus, you can use the app day by day and only ever see the news stories. For now, News Digest is also completely ad-free, and if Yahoo can keep it that way, I can see this app, or others like it, really taking off. News Digest succeeds because instead of doing everything sort of well, it does one thing almost perfectly. It is uncluttered, uncomplicated, and incredibly easy to use. It serves its purpose and rapidly gets out of your way.

Yahoo’s Summly technology condenses stories to a few key sentences.

Ultimately, both apps are very slick and very forward-thinking. While I find it easy to criticize Paper’s news-reading flow, it’s clear that it was designed to turn Facebook’s content on its head and display stuff in a new way. Paper has Groups and Messages functionality embedded in it too, allowing it to be used as a complete replacement for the current app, and that’s pretty cool. On the other hand, News Digest exists in a bit of a vacuum. There are no accounts to speak of, nor does the app seem to exist in an ecosystem of other Yahoo! services and products. Rather, it’s quite free of branding, and email/Facebook/sharing options are relegated to a small button at the bottom of articles. I prefer getting news from News Digest, but I would be interested to see a “never-ending” implementation of it, more akin to Flipboard, Paper and other aggregators.

I’m still waiting for a service that makes me buck RSS feeds as my primary source of news, but seeing apps like these crop up is a good sign. There’s a demand for logical, all-content news services, and in time, I think we’ll be seeing some great things.

Film Review: American Football

I had the opportunity to watch LEVYFilm’s American Football last night. Released a few months ago, the documentary had several sold-out screenings at the Cinerama in downtown Seattle, but unfortunately I was on the other coast and couldn’t make it to any of them. Thankfully, the film was released on Blu-Ray and I was finally able to see the film I was so excited about for so long.

The documentary, a behind-the-scenes look at the Seattle Sounders FC soccer team for roughly a season, had reached an almost mythical status in my imagination. Director Scott Levy had been sharing various clips and teasers on his website for months leading up to its eventual release. His camera work, his choice of musical score, his vision for the passion of the game and the characters that emerge from it, all of it excited me. And for more than just the obvious reason — though I like to identify as a relatively passionate Sounders fan, I’m equally a fan of American soccer on the whole, and the growth of the sport in this country over the last few years. It seemed like he was trying to tell a story that was greater than just this team, and that was promising.

This is why American Football held such mystique for me. Even the title seemed perfect: a bit of a play on words, showcasing the reality of soccer in America at this point in time. Teasers included a clip from Sounders defender Zach Scott, a player who’s been with the team for a decade yet still only makes $50,000 a year. “My wife’s been huge, because I’m sure not supporting my family with my salary” (I paraphrase). I was thrilled that this fascinating detail of American professional sports was going to be expanded upon in a documentary about my favorite sports team. Yet ultimately, when the two-and-a-half hour film played out, it had an identity crisis in the story that it was trying to tell.

To be fair, there were a lot of stories to be told, and given the type of film that Levy wanted to produce, maybe he did the best he could. He had incredibly close access to the team, often filming in the locker room and practice facilities to get clips of team interactions and impassioned speeches from coach Sigi Schmid. The film opens with the crushing defeat of the Sounders’ 2011 playoff loss against Real Salt Lake, and goes on to show various game clips of the 2012 season leading up to the conference final against the LA Galaxy.

It could have been a pretty good sports season documentary, but it doesn’t tell enough of a narrative of the team’s preparation and struggles to perform well during the season and make the playoffs. Scattered regular season games are shown, but there’s no illuminated narrative of “We need to win this game to clinch a playoff berth”. To the viewer, it almost seems like a given that the team will return to the playoffs as they did in 2011 and have a second shot at making things right.

So the film isn’t really about a soccer team’s push to make it to the playoffs. It is, however, speckled with interesting interviews from various Sounders players, as well as some of the coaching staff. We get to hear about upbringing, childhood experiences and struggles, and what brought many of the characters into the professional soccer world. They’re all valid interviews, but many are punctuated by the abrupt culminating question, “Do you tell your parents you love them?” It’s meant to be a thematic question that cuts to the heart of players and demonstrates something about their relationships, but the theme is never expanded upon in a significant way. It’s seen pretty clearly that while every player loves their parents, some express it more directly than others. This is valid, but there’s never any followup that makes the information worthwhile. We don’t see how these different players perform differently on the pitch, for example.

The theme I was most excited to see, the concept of “American football” being a sport that’s still on the rise, populated mostly by players making middling wages, is something that just wasn’t expanded upon enough. Besides Zach Scott, many of the players interviewed are making higher wages, and few interview questions press about money, motivation, and what it’s like to play in the states. And it’s fine that this isn’t the focus of the documentary, but I just wish something else had emerged as the major theme. The pacing of the movie also didn’t help. It steadily introduced interviewees two at a time throughout the film, and did little to drum up anticipation for the LA Galaxy playoff matches.

Of course, I can only applaud what Scott Levy has done here. He and his small team have assembled a love letter to Sounders fans: a beautifully filmed extended meditation on the team, its players, its dynamics, and the never-ending pursuit of excellence. The camera work was gorgeous and varied, and the instrumental score worked well to bolster the modern vibe of the cinematic style. Even with its long runtime, the film was enjoyable to watch throughout and reminded me why I was a fan of the sport in the first place.

Ultimately, American Football is a film that most Sounders fans will enjoy immensely, but it just isn’t a film about American football. It’s a film about a team and its players. There’s emotion here, but there isn’t a single narrative that rises above the rest. Fans of MLS may do well to watch it, but their patience might be tested by its decadent runtime. And I’m still waiting for something, anything, whether it’s a documentary, a memoir or something else, that tells the story of professional sports players making as little as $35,000 a year. To me, that’s a fascinating and seemingly unknown story that needs to be told.

Album Review: Blitzen Trapper, VII

Seven albums in, Blitzen Trapper continues to redefine their sound. 2010’s Destroyer of the Void saw the band adopt a surreal folk-rock sound, 2011’s American Goldwing embraced a rich Americana twang, and now with VII, that sound has changed yet again. Eric Earley and crew have in some ways gone back to the edgy, experimental alt-country sounds that made Wild Mountain Nation so enjoyable. But stylistically, VII is less varied and largely less enjoyable than even its hokey predecessor.

Undoubtedly the largest issue with VII is the direction Eric Earley’s vocals have taken – he’s more often chanting his lyrics than singing to a tune. It isn’t inherently bad, but because so many songs incorporate this lyrical style, many of them having a similar structure, several songs on the album blend together into one generic mass. “Shine On”, for example, the album’s second track, sounds like a direct continuation from the opener, “Feel The Chill”, to the extent where the former doesn’t feel like it needs to exist.

Sometimes the craziness succeeds. “Oregon Geography” and “Neck Tatts, Cadillacs” are so unabashedly out there with Blitzen Trapper’s frantic style that they manage to work and are high points of the album.

When VII is not lyrically boring, it’s largely forgettable, if only because it fails to match the band’s previous efforts. “Valley of Death” has a “Black River Killer”-esque riff, but it lacks the same lyrical punch. In fact, many songs on the album aren’t melodically lacking, but the production prevents them from reaching maximum potential. Choruses rarely reach the large sonic levels they deserve, and Earley often seems disinterested with singing. Many songs come and go unnoticed; few leave a lasting mark.

Some standouts do exist: “Ever Loved Once” sounds like the Blitzen Trapper I’ve been listening to years, with a strong chorus and trademark guitar interludes. “Don’t Be A Stranger” would fit right in with the other strong country tracks of American Goldwing.

Though VII is not Blitzen Trapper’s strongest effort, it’s worth remembering that their recorded work is only half of the ticket anymore. For this fall’s tour cycle, the band has been cherry-picking the strongest tracks from the new album and playing them with more energy. Paired with other standouts from their catalog, the band’s live show continues to be one of the sharpest, most well-rounded rock shows I’ve seen, incorporating alternative, folk, country sounds brilliantly.

With VII being Blitzen Trapper’s first release on Vagrant after a three-record stint with Sub Pop, only time will tell what sonic direction the band will head for next. Though VII is at times forgettable, there are still alt-country pearls that remind listeners why we know of the band in the first place.

6.5/10

VII is out now on Vagrant Records. Live shows are publicly available for download from The Internet Archive.

A brief introduction

Hi, I’m Alex. This blog is just meant to be a public face for my thoughts on the internet.

I also blog about music for wmfo.org, so anything that doesn’t go there will probably end up here.

Generally, this will end up being a blog about music, technology, culture, coffee perhaps. Anything that I think deserves attention. Thanks for visiting.