apps

Thinking about hitting the uninstall button on your phone’s Instagram app since learning about Facebook’s acquisition of the company? You aren’t alone.

While the news may have vaulted Instagram to the top of the App Store charts, some customers have expressed unease about the deal and are looking for alternatives.

One company looking to turn Instagram’s possible lemons into its own lemonade is Via.Me, a newly launched app that describes itself as part Instagram, part Tumblr and part Pinterest.

“We’re trying to bring all the good things of all the good social apps out there into one space,” said Rupert Staines, UK-based managing director of RadiumOne, the company that rolled out Via.Me. Read more

Author and journalist Susan Orlean (left) has written two nonfiction pieces that have been turned into films. She’ll discuss her new book, Rin Tin Tin, in Mediabistro’s first online Literary Festival & Workshops starting July 16. Other speakers include Rebecca Skloot, Jason Boog, and Jason Allen Ashlock. Register now.

Storify, the popular drag-and-drop storytelling tool, is coming to an iPad near you in the form of a brand new, free app, the company announced today. The iPad application makes Storify available on mobile devices for the first time.

“Users have asked for it for a long time,” Jeff Elder, Storify’s marketing director, told me via email. “This is a storytelling app, letting you create content on the iPad as never before.”

Just like the Storify website, the app lets users curate content from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites. There are two main differences: Users can tweet directly from the app and it is also touch-enabled, allowing content to be moved with just the touch of a finger.

“Whether you’re at a conference or at home, you can mix social streams to create simple, beautiful stories to share and remember the moments in life that matter,” Xavier Damman, Storify co-founder and CEO, said in a press release. “You now have storytelling at your fingertips.” Read more

Yesterday, Facebook revealed the names of 12 media companies launching social reader apps on Timeline. Seven of them are news-themed.

The Guardian and the Washington Post were two of the biggest names to first experiment with social readers. So far, almost 6 million people have signed up for and installed The Guardian‘s news app, says Martin Belam, the news organization’s lead user experience and information architect. More than 5o percent of users are under the age of 24.

“The app is putting our reporting and features in front of the grown-up audience of the future,” Belam recently blogged.

Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s director of media partnerships, concurs that the apps have, so far, shown “significant increases in traffic and engagement.”

“These apps create new ways for readers to discover content, while giving publishers the opportunity to reach new audiences,” Osofsky wrote in a blog post announcing the newest additions to Timeline. “They’re built around news and content people care about and identify with and provide easy ways to control the social experience.”

So, who are the new news apps on the block?

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It seems that despite the ever-quickening speeds of information travel, long-form journalism is adapting and thriving in the new media environment. Yesterday, Longform.org released its iPad app, one that doesn’t merely plop the website in app form, but tries to tailor the experience directly for the iPad user. Its design is sleek and minimal, and users can save articles with Readability, Instapaper and Read It Later.  One can subscribe to Longform.org’s most popular sources, including magazine favorites like The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Atlantic; Internet denizens The Awl and Grantland; and even fellow aggregators Longreads. Read more

The next time you log onto Facebook to post your latest article, think twice about what you share. Instead of copying in the link, why not share an image from the story instead?

That method worked well for ProPublica. Its graphic of changing congressional support for SOPA and PIPA from Jan 18. to Jan. 19 went viral after being posted on ProPublica’s Facebook page Thursday night. In less than 48 hours, the image received more than 17,000 likes, was shared more than 10,100 times and received a whopping 1,298 comments. And those numbers are still rising.

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