Circa News App Wants to Change Online News
By Gilbert Falso :: 11:14 PM
The new Circa news app for iOS, launched earlier today, is a news reading platform unlike any other out in the market today. Built from the ground up specifically for the smartphone platform, Circa’s creators want to change the way news is consumed on the Internet.
After a rocky start – the app was not initially available this morning in the app store as it was promised, and then server issues plagued the app once many had it installed on their phones -Â it seems to be humming right along this evening.
Unlike other news apps and aggregators in the App Store, Circa doesn’t just bring in news from various feeds and deliver it to you. Circa has an editorial team hard at work to gather top news and break individual stories down into into parts. Facts, quotes, photos, maps, and other content are curated for each story, and delivered in bite-sized chunks that you can flip through on your phone. Each chunk of content is little more than one screen length high.
At launch, Circa offers a limited feed of content and categories. There are two main categories, Top Stories and Election 2012, and the site’s creators say they are planning on adding more categories in the near future. There is no search feature yet, so if you are looking for a particular topic within a category, you’re out of luck at this point.
When a user signs up for Circa, it asks to link via Facebook, or you can opt to sign up with an e-mail address instead. When you read a story and want to share a piece of the content (individual content pieces are called “points”), you can either share an individual point, or a link to the entire story. Sharing is available to both Facebook and Twitter.
Circa is co-founded by Ben Huh, CEO of The Cheezburger Network.