It has been with no small amount of interest that I have been following the latest developments in the news industry.  As a former journalist, I often wonder how my life could have been different if I had been involved with a newspaper first hand today.  I personally do not believe that the industry is dying, so much as it is evolving.  Metamorphosing into a whole new paradigm.  As evidence of these changes, Fluent Mobile, today, launched the Fluent News Aggregator, which draws news from over 30 different sources and delivers them straight to your iPhone or iPod Touch (or other device via its WAP based website).

The company describes this latest approach to news gathering like this: 

Fluent Mobile, a mobile content organization and delivery company, launched today along with Fluent News, its first application for the iPhone. Founded by a team of internationally recognized computer science experts, Fluent Mobile is dedicated to bringing the speed, reliability and convenience of desktop Web browsing to handheld devices. Fluent News is the first iPhone application to aggregate exclusively made-for-mobile content from the most trusted news sources across the Web into a single, easy-to-read and up-to-the-minute mobile newspaper. It’s the fastest, most convenient way to browse and read news on the iPhone.

What that means is a whole new level of coverage.  Unlike the AP Mobile News App, which gives you a great deal of coverage from only one source, Fluent Mobile offers coverage of the same stories from multiple sources.  This gives you not only depth of coverage, but also a significant breadth of coverage, as you will see the same story covered from a variety of different angles. 

I have to admit that I had a hard time understanding how Fluent Mobile was going to improve the mobile news scene.  But I think this quote from Fluent Mobile’s CEO, Micah Adler really puts the program into perspective:

We are going to redefine expectations for the mobile Web experience,  Over just the past two years, the mobile industry has seen great advances in device capabilities, bandwidth and the sheer breadth of mobile content. However, browsing the mobile Web can still be an extremely frustrating experience. Fluent Mobile is dedicated to narrowing the experience gap between mobile and desktop Web browsing by optimizing the search, organization and delivery of dynamic mobile content. At the forefront of the news industry’s transformation from paper to desktop to mobile, Fluent News is the just first step in our plans to improve the usability of the mobile Web.

To that end, although the application is currently available for the iPhone or iPod Touch, Fluent Mobile is available from any platform via their WAP site: http://www.fluentnews.com.

Although Fluent News makes it fast and easy to see a broad range of the most important news being covered by many of the top news organizations, there are still several key functions which are missing from this initial release.

First is customization.  Although Fluent News provides stories from many of the top news sources (including the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, and plenty more), it does not give you the option of identifying the news sources which are important to you.  It would be nice if you could enter the websites for your favorite news sources and include them in the aggregation.  From what I understand, however, this feature is already in the works, and hopefully coming soon.

Along with customization is local news.  While it is nice to see this kind of coverage of national and international news, most of us are more directly affected on a daily basis by local news.  So, the ability to input your location (preferably by GPS) and access local news papers would make this an even more impressive program.

Filters.  Right now, organizing the entries you receive in Fluent News is not very sophisticated.  Sure, there are about a dozen sections which you can use to separate entries, but their is no way to focus a search.  So, for example, if I want to see the latest baseball news, the best I can do is select the sports category, and scroll through all of the sports until I find what I need.  It would be nice if, like other news resources, you could filter by keywords or sub-categories, so that I could separate baseball news from other news.

This kind of filtering would also allow Fluent News to magnify coverage in one area.  For example, if I select the latest headlines, then it will offer a broad look at the top 25 or so stories of the day.  But I should be able to dial that in to focus on one subject.  For example, the death of Michael Jackson.  Selecting that subject would then magnify coverage by giving me 25 stories using that keyword.  This occurs a little on the main page, but i really think this ability to focus in on a single topic, zooming in and out of the information highways and byways is the key to the whole program, and could be much more powerfully integrated and implemented in the program.

Despite these additional advanced features, there is a lot to like in the initial release of Fluent Mobile.  Most importantly among them is the instant access to complete articles.  If you see an article you want to read, just click it.  Unlike an RSS reader which will give you partial access to the article or a differently formatted article; Fluent takes you straight to the source, pre-fetching the full-length articles.

The other thing here is that the program constantly updates to find the latest news and bring it directly to you.  This “always on”connection means you will always have the best access to the most important news, as it is reported. 

The best feature, to me, however, is the integration of social networking.  You can use the sharing feature to post stories to your personal Facebook and Twitter pages.  This is fantastic, no longer will you need to cut and paste or try to remember the story until you can get to your desktop computer,  Just hit the button to share any story via Facebook, Twitter, or the more traditional email. 

I also thought that although the interface came across as a bit bland (no pictures on the main pages), it was extremely effective.  The aggregator lets you know exactly where your news is coming from by including the newspaper (or TV station’s) logo along with the headline and first couple of sentences. 

Additionally, since it is an application and not just a web site (at least on the iPhone and iPod Touch)  you will find full offline access whether you are connected to the Internet or not.   Hopefully, similar offline applications will be developed for other mobile platforms as well.

The best part of Fluent News is that it is currently available free-of-charge from the iTunes App Store iPhone or iPod Touch (though there are small ads inside the program).  Other platforms will have to stick to the WAP site until additional versions are released.

For more, check out Fluent News at www.fluentmobile.com .

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