The Road To NewsGIF 2.0 (Part 1)

I admire forward-thinking startups that engage their users to be active participants in the evolution and creation of the products they are developing. For NewsGIF, it’s an iterative process. Feedback will be gathered, evaluated, development is prioritized, and features are tested. It’s a continuous loop with the hope that the product stays relevant and we continue to build a product people will continue to use.

We launched NewsGIF May 20, 2015. Our philosophy was that we’d rather build something totally wacky and be wrong, then build something that’s been done before. News has taken on a fairly broad meaning. Twitter is a pipeline for news and really transformed journalism. Facebook continues to deliver news from our friends and we still care after all these years. Flipboard is a beautiful, personalized news magazine for your iPad. Circa (RIP) nailed developing stories. The news is something that can be experienced in different ways and in different forms and we think we’ll continue to see many more information experiences part of our daily lives.

At Stagename, we’re building an information experience around GIFs. GIFs are delightful and make people smile and sometimes news stories that would otherwise not be interesting, become interesting when you experience it through a GIF. If we’ve delivered some useful nugget of information in a GIF and made you smile in a few short seconds, then we’re meeting our goals for content. If we can do that at a massive scale for a diverse audience, then we think we can make NewsGIF a viable news service.

Our goal for NewsGIF 2.0 is to make the consumption of news delightful for everyone and reward and recognize contributors, the users who turn news headlines into GIFs and become active participants in making the information experience possible.

In the 1.0 version of NewsGIF, we targeted an audience of people like us. The stories were a little geeky, but we liked them and so did a fellow community of makers at ProductHunt.com. With NewsGIF 2.0 we hope can delight people of all ages, interests and nationalities.

The most obvious change in 2.0 is going to be the main area of consumption, the home screen. It’s the first thing everyone will see.

The top part of the screen is a mini “GIF TV” and it’s for the majority of users because you can open the app and not have to even touch the screen to get your daily dose of news in GIFs. It cycles through recent stories, but also uses algorithms to surface the best of NewsGIF. Every so often, It switches stories automatically. If something is of interest to you, simply tap it to dive in.

The bottom half of the screen is a list of channels that have been created by our Editorial staff. Since all news stories are curated, we’ll have a dozen or so channels that remain staples and can best group a collection of NewsGIFs. These are our signatures, much like recurring segments on Saturday Night Live, or even The Daily Show. Some new channels may surface here from time to time, but the channel list will always be fairly exclusive. We’ll feature a dozen or so channels with the ability to still search for hundreds of other channels.

Up next is Part 2. Let us know what you think of our plans for NewsGIF 2.0 so far. We’re planning to release it this fall.