Last year we wrote about a personalised tablet news service being developed by Betaworks, the technology development company behind online services such as Tweetdeck and Bit.ly, and the New York Times.
TechCrunch’s Erick Schoenfield has been playing with an early version of the new app, called News.me, and has a preview up on the site.
Schoenfield is billing News.me as the NYT’s answer to the Daily, but it seems much more like social aggregation apps such as Flipboard, using Twitter and URL-shortener Bit.ly to pull in content.
When you first launch News.me, you see the welcome screen below with a few tutorial hints: Tap on the people along the top dock to see what stories are appearing in their Twitter streams, tap on a story headline or excerpt to read it full screen, or you can stretch a story open inside the stream with a reverse-pinch. This reverse-pinch is one of my favorite parts of the experience. You flick to scroll through the stream, and when you find something you like, you can open it up and read it without loading a new page.