This year, newsrooms experimented with Facebook social readers and tablet apps to grow their audiences.
Cavnar and Miller met while working on similar products, social readers Nsyght and Knowmore, respectively.
Well, to its credit, it has social features that are very desirable among social readers.
I followed all the links on Bruce Francis Cloudblogg story and now realize this is actually about Facebook social readers.
We are one of thousands of media companies competing for attention, and, in our case, we seek the attention of young, highly social readers with seemingly infinite interests.
The recent decline in social readers may be due to this version driving less clicks per impression, or Facebook simply displaying it less frequently than the old one.
Take the story that crossed whatever we call the wires these days about how social readers are being destroyed by some tweaking of the Facebook engine.
Update: Ryan Kellett, the Engagement Producer for The Washington Post confirms it was news feed changes that led to the decline, not user discontent as purported in BuzzFeed's article "Facebook Social Readers Are All Collapsing".
In Yahoo!'s case, they'd keep their own stocks and news apps, but they'd farm out things that are a little more niche (think Yelp, Spotify, social readers, etc).
"If that has any correlation with how most Facebook users feel about Facebook's social readers, then there is certainly a wide market for this extension, and certainly a number of things Facebook can improve upon in this area".
Meanwhile the gush of social traffic is highly volatile since the platform owners can close the spigot with quick tweak of their algorithms, like how Facebook killed social readers.
