The popular url shortening and tracking service Bit.ly has an ambitious new app up its sleeve and it's expected to debut tomorrow. The new service, called News.me, is a new kind of news aggregator that plugs into your social graph to serve up full, content-rich articles that will pique your interest.
News.me's core feature is a stream of (licensed) news articles from around the Web formatted for the iPad. But unlike other iPad reading devices like Instapaper and Flipboard, the articles are curated based on who you follow on Twitter and the people they follow. So if the people in your Twitter stream are talking about and linking to a story, News.me will send it to you laid out beautifully with the original photos and videos intact (or text-only, if you like). Additionally, you can tap into other people's feeds, and see the article's their reading (privacy settings permitting).
The app was developed with support from The New York Times and will cost 99 cents a week to use ($34.99 for the whole year). Since News.me pays publishers (including the Times, the Associated Press, Gawker Media, AOL/HuffPo, Mashable and more) to use and re-format their content, the charge is necessary to keep things afloat and allows for more advanced collaborations with publishers down the line.
You can read more about News.me in this TechCrunch expose. The official site should allow downloading the app soon.
