Social news is a hot area and it has been for quite some time, with popular startups including Flipboard, Pulse and a multitude of others vying for that coveted spot on your iPhone or iPad home screen. Into the fray comes Smartr, an iPhone app designed to filter out all of those pesky status updates, and cut through the extraneous check-ins and Foursquare updates to deliver you the news stories that you want to read without other distractions.
But is Smartr worth the hype? Let’s find out after the break.
What’s the story?
Smartr is broken up into 3 core areas, the first being the Smartr news area which allows you to view various sources of information, including trending news stories across Smartr; channels for Breaking News, Technology and Gossip; as well as a feed of news from your Smartr friends.
The second area is dedicated to news from your Twitter stream. The Twitter functionality within Smartr is comprehensive, including support for multiple accounts as well as Twitter lists. This ensures that you can both skim stories from all of your Twitter followers or whittle these down by specific interests. Now, the one thing that sets Smartr apart from being just a run-of-the-mill Twitter client — apart from the aforementioned focus on stories — is the way that it handles this content sifting and presentation.
Smartr allows you to follow your Twitter stream or it's own feed sources
The team at Factyle focus on only bringing you worthy readable content that is extracted from shared links and is also stripped of ads. Stories are presented in appealing and easy-to-read snippets that when clicked upon, lead you to the full story in a manner that will be very familiar to fans of apps such as Readability or Instapaper. When you’re in the story view, you can quickly tap into full screen reading mode so that stories can easily be reposted or retweeted (both native and edited) as well as replied to. You can also share to Facebook or favourite the article within Smartr.
The third major area of the app is it’s Facebook integration, which in much the same way as with Twitter, focuses on extracting the most important reading content and presenting this back to you in an easily digestible feed of stories. The Facebook integration again allows for stories to be shared on Facebook or tweeted back to Twitter.
Want more integrations?
A key criteria for me when it comes to most social news apps these days is that they are well integrated with services such as Instapaper and Tumblr which I use heavily, and I’m happy to say that Smartr delivers in this area. Smartr has options for Instapaper and Read It Later, as well as the option to publish stories to both Tumblr and Posterous.
Smartr formats stories for easy reading and allows for quick re-publishing or saving for later reading
Smartr Friends
Smartr includes a section for you to follow your own network of friends on Smartr to see what they are reading. This area in many ways reminds me of the recent update to Instapaper that allows you to follow others and create your own little social reading circle where you easily stay abreast of interesting articles and news from your own close network.
The one shortcoming with this is that it’s highly dependent on getting to a certain level of usage so that people can actually find someone to follow. Although I had four friends on Twitter that read content on Smartr, none of these were recent. The service does offer ten featured users, though I wouldn’t mind seeing more emphasis put on this area, perhaps with improved suggested users or even direct curation of content by the Smartr team until they get more people on there.
In the app you can follow what your own Smart network of friends are reading
Conclusion
Overall Smartr is a great app — not fantastic or spectacular, but certainly good and worth your time and attention to see if it’s right for you. My one main criticism with Smartr is that it does feel sluggish in performance from when you first open the app until you get to a story. I assume this has a lot to do with the app trying to filter out the worthy content from all the other updates and extract it into a readable format. However, I did notice that the most recent update to the app less than a week ago focused on these loading issues.
I think ultimately the app would be a perfect fit for those people who love to follow a lot of content sharers or blogs on Twitter and Facebook, however, I am not necessarily in this category. I admit to being a big devotee of Reeder and getting my content from my Google Reader feeds (which I notice is the most requested feature for Smartr on their community forum).
All in all, the area of social news delivery and curation has yet to be completely cracked and I can see plenty of potential for the team at Factyle to build on the base that they already have with Smartr. This is certainly an app to keep your eye on.