BOW+ARROW

The New York Times recently published an article about how apps and web services are enabling consumers to customize how they read their online content. From apps like Flipboard and Pulse to services like Readability and Instapaper, users are increasingly demanding to consume content whenever, wherever and however they want.

When Apple introduced the iPad a year ago, many print publishers saw it as a panacea for their dwindling readership. By creating digital editions, they hoped to recapture some of the eyeballs lost to aggregators and RSS feeds. One of the pioneering publication apps was the WIRED Magazine iPad app. Because of its novelty, its debut issue sold 73,000 digital copies in nine days, almost as much as on newsstands. There is a clear desire from users to read magazines on their tablets.

What that first generation of attempts miss though, is they are trying to replicate 20th century print experience on a 21st century device. The magazine apps feel very one way. But the iPad is an Internet-connected device and users on the Internet demand more interactive experiences. They want to copy and paste passages to put on their blogs. They want to share articles via Facebook and Twitter. Using Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution, Condé Nast is starting to address some of these issues.

Meanwhile apps such as Flipboard are aggregating content and repackaging it for their users. Flipboard presents news items according to a user’s social graph, creating a personalized and highly relevant news stream. Additionally, the app presents this content in a unique way: as a paper magazine. The visual is striking, yet it still holds familiarity with users since it loosely mimics the experience of reading a real-world magazine, with the benefits of interactivity. And so far it has been a hit with users, even earning an App of the Year award from Apple.

Different kinds of content demand different kinds of packages. For example as a designer, I—along with most designers and art directors—flip through magazines such as Communication Arts and Print, and peruse blogs and websites like LovelyPackage.com and SmashingMagazine.com. Seeing something cool usually sparks an idea for whatever we’re currently working on.

To get through the hundreds of design-related sites out there, I use RSS feeds to aggregate this content for myself in Google Reader. Unfortunately, because I am so busy, I am not able to keep up with all my feeds. I may manage to check it only every few days. And I dread seeing that “1000+” number next to my unread items.

So last year, when the iPad was introduced, I decided to find a solution as an independent side project. I knew that an app on this large dedicated canvas could be created to serve this need of efficiently consuming visual inspiration. I teamed up with a developer friend and we started work on DesignScene.

We set out to create something that designers would enjoy using and become part of their daily ritual. We had two primary objectives:

• The UI must serve the content and the audience. It has to be beautiful and show off visuals well.
• The content must be relevant. There’s a glut of design-related websites and blogs on the Internet. Let’s help designers navigate through them.

The UI we designed is sparse—a simple grid that takes advantage of the screen real estate afforded by the tablet. Users flick through the various grid cells to see an assortment of images. They can enlarge the images to fill the screen or read the accompanying text from the original source via the built-in web browser. DesignScene surfaces up the latest inspirational images of not only design, but also architecture, photography, art and so on. The content is a curated list of sources and—as a whole—has an editorial point of view to enhance discovery.

It’s been two weeks since DesignScene launched. So far we’ve had great response from users and media. We built social sharing into the app and we can already see hundreds of discoveries being shared on Twitter. Our users are interacting with content in a way that was not possible just a year ago.

Roger Wong is a creative director in our San Francisco office. Check out DesignSceneApp.com if you’re interested in his iPad app.

On yesterday’s episode of PJA Radio, Mike O’Toole and Matt Magee talked about Facebook’s new ad platform, Sponsored Stories, and the implications it has regarding the future of advertising. Here are some highlights from the show:

What is Facebook up to? It’s a very specific kind of new ad format that turns your friends’ actions into a form of promoted content. For example, if you use Facebook Places and check in at Starbucks, Starbucks could pay to use your check-in and any associated comments in an ad on the side of the page that all of your friends will see. This applies to four actions on Facebook: likes, check-ins, actions within a custom application and page posts.

Do Facebook users have any say in the matter? Right now, Facebook isn’t giving you any control over whether your content is being used by the brands. In fact, journalist David Berkowitz recently suggested stated that this kind of action is typical of Facebook: bold, clever and lacking empathy. It will be interesting to see if Facebook makes this an opt-in feature in the near future.

How do people feel about the Sponsored Stories ad platform? Check out the results of our recent poll. You may be surprised with the results so far.

Do people want to be part of a brand promotion? The brand is essentially paying to make visible that which is already visible. But “liking” Coke on Facebook isn’t the same as saying that we want to be part of a promotion for Coke. This seems like another situation where Facebook is taking a bold step and will ultimately ask for forgiveness instead of permission.

Is this change actually going to benefit Facebook users? There’s an inherent usefulness to marketing that makes it a service and not just a play, and there’s certainly a lot of potential here, with obvious dangers in sight. It will likely come down to whether or not we are getting enough utility in exchange for a little bit of our privacy.

Listen to the full episode here: Be Careful What You “Like,” It Could Become the Next Ad Your Facebook Friends See

What do you think of Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories ad platform?

Facebook recently announced its long-awaited ad platform, Sponsored Stories, which turns your likes, checkins, and Page posts into advertisements featured on the right-side column of your friends’ Facebook homepages. The idea behind it is to leverage users’ trust in their friends’ brand preferences; ideally seeing friends’ loyalty to particular brands will drive increased trust and increased traffic. As writer David Berkowitz puts it, the announcement of Sponsored Stories is characteristic of Facebook: bold, clever, and lacking empathy.

We wanted to get a better understanding of how Facebook users feel about the new ad platform, so we created a poll on LinkedIn. Here are the results so far:

How do you feel about Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad platform? Take our poll here.