Content, content and more content… Introducing Precious
One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that we get to access so many sources of knowledge and information. All of them provide us with way more content than we can actually absorb or process. Most users can’t keep up with this massive influx of content, but fear of missing out makes us want to catch up with all this information, usually at the expense of something else we enjoy doing as well. But not even this way can we cover all sources we’d like to keep track of.
In the blogs era the most common solution was to use an RSS reader. RSS readers are a very interesting solution to the problem because they operate on a standard that most content generation platforms (or arguably, used to) support. However, while RSS readers solve the problem of fetching all these articles scattered along many different sources and presenting them to the user in a consistent way within a single place, they still don’t solve the pain of being overwhelmed by too much content.
One proxy to the problem is to use, either manual (done by a human) or automatic (done by an algorithm and probably based on some metrics), curation. Blog owners, or even specialists on a certain topic, are increasingly switching to the digest email newsletter paradigm, where they send a periodic newsletter curated with the content that they think is most relevant to them and to their audience. This poses an improvement to the RSS reader because email is more democratised as a platform and the content is already filtered by a reliable source. I really believe newsletters are the way to go for content creators because they can reach a much larger audience, and this audience uses the platform itself way more often that they would if there was a separate app/website for reading content, let alone having to check each source separately.
Digest email newsletters can be a very effective approach to content curation and distribution. However, there are many content platforms that ignore this paradigm. That is probably due to the fact that they are not interested in allowing anybody to consume their content out of their platform since it would be less profitable for them to do so. I believe that’s the wrong approach to take because a user who doesn’t get a way to consume the most relevant content in a regulated way might as well quit from the service. However, some kind of summary on the most relevant stuff might help keep a user onboard and might even encourage her to consume more content if the summary hasn’t been enough.
One of my favourite sources of content that doesn’t provide any kind of curated digest of the best content in their platform is Twitter. And it’s frustrating as a user because I just quitted checking it after checking it too regularly because I feared missing out. For a long time, I’ve been missing getting a daily newsletter with the most relevant tweets on my Timeline so that I can stay updated even when I’m too busy to check social media. Well, today I’m happy to show Precious Digest, a daily digest newsletter that’s automatically generated from the most relevant tweets on your Timeline and sent to your inbox everyday. The algorithm that is responsible for curation is pretty simple and will have to be tuned for sure. But I’m hopeful it will be good enough to be useful to me and to many others.
As a last note, here’s the links for the websites that send some of my favourite newsletters: Jason Calacanis, Ben Evans, Tech.eu, HN Digest, [Product Hunt](www.producthunt.com), Quora…