News.me for the iPad Gives You the Ultimate Stream of Interesting Content from Twitter Friends and Opinion Makers

News.me is an iPad application that gives you a stream of interesting content based on the people and organizations you follow on Twitter, as well as their publishing partners. These include the Associated Press, Fast Company, Forbes, GigaOM, Lifehacker, The Next Web, as well as The New York Times which developed News.me in collaboration with the technology incubator Betaworks. They got their cool News.me domain with our Development program for premium .Me domains, used also by companies such as Facebook and WordPress.

How to Setup News.me

While the iPad app is free and includes a free 2-week trial, it will cost you 99 cents a week to use News.me. But lets take it step-by-step. After downloading the News.me iPad application, you need to connect it to your Twitter profile and activate the 2-week trial.

After activating News.me, you get to pick the users you want to see a stream of content from inside the app. First you pick the News.me users you already know, based on the people you follow on Twitter. Then you pick some of the featured users, such as Huffington Post’s founder Arianna Huffington or venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson:

Read On!

Content in the News.me iPad app appears in a stream very similar to an RSS reader, but optimized visually for Apple’s tablet. Each story shows a title, description and the users who shared the content. By default you can read the article in a streamlined, minimalistic view which makes for a better reading experience. You can also switch to browsing it in the “normal” view on the actual website.

So why do publishers work with News.me? The 99 cent fee is designed to not only generate revenue for the project, but also give News.me the money to pay publishers for the content their users view in a streamlined format, without the ads. Each publisher or licensor gets a fixed fee earch time an articles in viewed by a user. If you’re a publisher you should keep in mind that links shared with Bit.ly will appear more in News.me, since its also a project by Betaworks.

You have a number options in the application settings, such as editing the list of people you want to follow. As with similar reading apps, you get a list of bookmarked content with a little bookmark button in each article. You can also save content in your browser with their bookmarket and read it in the News.me app. The News.me team spiced up their iPad app with some nice effects that make reading it more interesting, although the interface could be a little more “tight”.

If you don’t have an iPad, but News.me sounds interesting, you can subscribe to their free email service which will get you a free email digest based on your Twitter stream. With News.me relying on Twitter users to use their app they might get a public that isn’t that interested in paying 99 cents a week, but that remains to be seen. Does News.me sound interesting to you? Download and test it! Then share your thoughts in the comments 🙂