This week will have a slightly different focus. Instead of reviewing a mobile app, I would like to introduce a new news reading format that has been gaining ground for a while now without any attention. This, as of now, is only available online, however marking it as a bookmark and opening it on your phone’s browser would be easy. Most phones have the option to set a bookmark on the home screen so the lack of the app is not a huge deal yet. So to get down to it, this is skimr.co:

Skimr is what I believe, to be the next thing in mobile news reading. As today’s world becomes more fast pace and on the go, news reading has to find a way to remain relevant and keep up. Skimr allows users to do what they do anyways, skim. Skimr has the simplest most bare bones layout of any news reader, you can add websites, rss feeds, or anything else that you please. It is optimized for mobile phone browsers and it’s idea is as simple as its layout: Delivers snippets of news with or without a featured image. Then the user can read the snippet, which consists of a few lines of the story, and decide if they wanna read the rest now, or read it later. It’s news reading on the go and it allows for a lot more consumption as a fraction of the time. I’m completely loving the idea and layout and soon enough other news readers are going to have to keep up. The only way I would say to improve on this is to have a curated stories page that is updated daily. This way an even better snippet can be arranged for multiple trending stories and the user can leave behind the idea of reading a whole story if they so choose. This is a great way to explore simpler news reporting, though I do enjoy reading whole stories. Skimr is definitely worth the look over and it’s completely free. Check it out at Skimr.co

-AJ