But it’s one the company will need to address as it scales to a broader audience. During Matter’s private beta, moderation hasn’t been an issue. While not entirely based on Twitter, Matter’s idea to follow people, and what they read and share, feels similar.Ī commenting feature enables discussions on shared articles, but to what extent you’ll see much action here may depend on who you follow. Nuzzel had a small but devoted following for its Twitter-based reading recommendations. The feature recalls the recently shuttered app Nuzzel, acquired by Twitter when it bought Scroll earlier this year. This allows you to track the shares from people whose suggestions you generally like. Users on Matter can follow others, in a model similar to social networks like Twitter. Image Credits: Matter (a user’s private queue) These highlights are also saved to users’ profiles, so you can visit someone you follow and see what sort of things they had made note of and shared. But Matter makes the option available across all the reading material being shared. This sounds similar to what digital publishing platform Medium offers across its own website and app. If someone follows you in Matter, they’ll see your highlights and annotations overlaid on the article when they read the same article. “You can think of it as like a lightweight way of broadcasting what you’re reading,” says Springwater of the highlighting feature. This sharing feature makes Matter a bit of a social network, as users can also highlight articles as they share, in addition to highlighting privately. Users’ reading lists are private by default, but you can choose which articles from the list you want to post publicly to the Matter community.
INSTAPAPER POCKET MATTER INSTALL
Like other “read it later” apps, like those offered by Pocket or Instapaper, Matter users can install a Chrome extension to build their reading list in the app, or they can make a recommendation directly in the mobile app itself. Image Credits: Matter (Matter’s homepage) Matter users can also feed in their recommendations to the app, which the team then curates, sending a subset of those suggestions to the homepage, as well. From their tweets, Matter’s team curates their recommendations further, to hand-select the best articles to share in the app. On the app’s homepage, you’ll discover recommended content that comes from a set of articles recommended by a group of “public thinkers” on Twitter who often share interesting news and links. But there isn’t an app that’s working to create what Matter calls a “recommendation” graph, where the best material is filtered, curated and brought to the forefront. Today, there are many places where people discover new material, from news headlines, to Twitter and other social apps, to newsletters hitting the inbox, and more. The co-founders began the development of Matter in early 2020, after raising an angel round, and later participated in startup accelerator Y Combinator’s summer 2020 batch.Īt the outset, one of Matter’s larger goals was to help people make better decisions about what to read. “It just became more and more apparent to us that there was an opportunity to build a better reading product,” he says.
It’s still just words on a screen, but there’s a lot more you can do and overlay to that,” explains Springwater. “There were all of these pain points and frictions around reading online, and the media ecosystem was changing - you have the rise of newsletters, you have the rise of individual creators, alternative media - and also that there was all this potential around what you could do to e-reading. The frustrations with the current set of reading apps drove Matter co-founders Ben Springwater and Robert Mackenzie - who met while working at Nextdoor - to take on the challenge of building a new tool for online reading. And people don’t only want to consume reading material as text - they want to listen to articles as audio, highlight key points and discuss with fellow readers.
INSTAPAPER POCKET MATTER SERIES
A startup called Matter, which aims to build a better reading app for today’s internet, is launching out of private beta testing and announcing the close of its $7 million Series A, led by GV (formerly Google Ventures.) The app enters a space where technologies for saving articles to read later, like Instapaper and Pocket, have lagged behind how people are now consuming online reading - through newsletters, personalized recommendations in other apps or through suggestions from peers on social platforms, for example.
0 kommentar(er)
