Hi, everyone. I'm one of the founders of Sidewire. Brian put it perfectly -- Sidewire was built to cut through the noise and give you an inside look into the news around you. It's too hard to quickly hear analysis from the people who _actually know_ what's going on. We're trying to fix that. We'd love to hear what you think!
The news world is honestly frustrating to me. It's becoming increasingly difficult to a) sift through the noise and b) know the credible sides of the story. Sidewire looks promising to me because it is trying to solve both of these problems by curating the commentary and pulling out only the most important pieces of information about each news story. The design is really straightforward - I was reading content within one tap after downloading the app. No other news app does that.
I'm also not totally on board with the current state of political commentary. There is *so* much clickbait and fluff out there, it's impossible to keep up with what actually matters in politics (especially heading into 2016). So far Sidewire is doing magical things by cutting out the shit and just letting me grab the most important headlines and curated commentary. I think millennials will relate to this style of news delivery.
Congrats on the launch, Sidewire!
Slick, easy to understand, compelling content - all great things. Congrats on that.
Not digging the interactions around chat/adding content. Forcing me to import contacts just to "chat" (and I'm not really sure what chat means) is annoying. Not letting me navigate out of that flow is super annoying.
Gets to a broader point - the stream feels like being a fly on the wall while insiders talk, which is really cool. But if it's only that, I'm not sure it gets to a deeper "engagement in politics" issue.
@realmandan thanks for checking it out!
Great feedback on the chat bit. By way of background: we got a lot of feedback from our beta testers that they wanted to be able to share the content easily in the app. So we built a way to send the analysis via a private in-app chat to your friends -- which we pull from your contacts. In order to let you find them and send to them, we need to grab your contacts. Any suggestions for doing that better?
And the "engagement in politics" bit is something we think about a lot around here (unsurprisingly...). We've actually been really happy with what we've seen so far -- and here's why. Before using Sidewire, lots of our beta testers would have a lot of these conversations:
COWORKER: "Hey did you hear about X yesterday?"
BETA TESTER: "Yeah. Saw that headline. Crazy."
And after starting to use Sidewire, those conversations become more like:
COWORKER: "Hey did you hear about X yesterday?"
BETA TESTER: "Yeah, saw that -- what's really interesting is that was caused by Y," or "... is going to result in Z," or "... the broader context around that is A."
And we think that's the first step. Making it easy to know better has to come before driving engagement -- because without the knowledge, engagement is unappealing.
Does that help solve the problem?
Awesome stuff. Plenty of ways to have in-app interactions without yanking the entire contact book - PH is an example :) (even if we wanted to have a non-public chat stream...) I didn't realize it was a private in-app chat, I'd love a way to add comments and content into the stream.
Cool to hear that users are getting more context where before they had none - that's what it's all about. Well done gang, congrats on launch!
@realmandan We purposefully disconnected the average user from the stream because that's how you get noisy channels. By focusing on credentialed newsmakers, we keep that "fly on the wall" factor. FWIW, you can also share via the stock iOS share sheet to Messages or FB Messenger, etc.
I love it. This is a much needed optimization of a increasingly complex topic. I love thinking about what this could become beyond the bubble of users; getting readers to a key level of understanding will make conversation everywhere so much more productive.
Looking forward to getting into this!
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