Scoop.it Launches A Social Curation App For The iPad

Scoop.it, a startup that helps users highlight interesting content (and, implicitly, their own knowledge in the field), is bringing its social curation tools to the iPad today with the launch of a new app. The company asks users to build topic pages where they aggregate relevant content (we’ve described these pages as “your own digital magazine“). Those pages are viewable on Scoop.it, shareable on social networks, and SEO-optimized. Plus, other users can follow those pages. In some ways, it’s like following someone on Twitter who tweets news and articles that you find interesting. However, co-founder and CEO Guillaume Decugis argued that “when you follow topics and not people,” the signal-to-noise ratio improves significantly (at least if you’re interested in learning more about the topic in question, rather than getting updates about someone’s life). The iPad app extends that idea to tablets. Decugis and Scoop.it President Marc Rougier gave me a demo of the app, browsing content by searching the app, looking at other topics, and reading the content that was recommended by Scoop.it’s personalization technology. When they found something they liked, it only took a couple of taps to save the article to one of their own topic pages, or to create an entirely new page. (And all of those edits are viewable on the web too.) In some ways, the demo reminded me of Storify. For one thing, both Scoop.it and Storify on the iPad are pitched as ways to go beyond just consuming content on tablets. However, Storify’s curation tools are focused on individual stories (say, turning a bunch of tweets around a single news story together into a coherent narrative), whereas Scoop.it is more topic-based — and in fact, Rougier said you can embed a Storify story on a Scoop.it page. The service already launched an iPhone app, but Decugis said that app was designed to be “a companion” to the web version — in fact, you need have an account with Scoop.it already in order to use it. The iPad app, on the other hand, can work as a standalone experience, no web registration needed. So even though the new app was built, in part, to answer the requests of existing users, Decugis said he’s hoping it helps Scoop.it reach a new audience too. The company recently raised a $2.6 million in new funding and it says its users have indexed and shared more than 50 million pieces of content.