A few days ago at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, Marissa Mayer spoke with Mike Arrington about the future of Yahoo!. Yahoo, Mayer argued, was a bit late getting to mobile, but has since placed a huge amount of emphasis on the platform. Towards the end of the conversation, Arrington asked something along the lines of, what app would you recommend to people who haven’t tried Yahoo in a while? Mayer’s answer was split between Weather and Yahoo News Digest. There was a big barrier, however, as News Digest was, at that time, only available on iOS.

The mention of News Digest didn’t make it into my original post, as I am an Android guy. However, not even two days later, News Digest was released for Android. After downloading and using the app, it seems that everything Mayer said about Yahoo’s commitment to mobile rings true. News Digest is one of the most beautiful, most useful apps I have ever used.

News Digest delivers users a summary of the top news stories twice each day. At 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. local time, Yahoo sends users concise summaries of anywhere from 9-15 news stores. Users can choose between U.S., U.K., Canada, and International versions. Each story is summarized in a concise and clear manner, covering the major points. Further, each article offers sources to read more about the topic, related Tweets, videos, and Wikipedia articles related to the topic. Essentially, Yahoo breaks down the days’ news into a format that allows for quick, easy reading. This is done in an incredibly beautiful way:

Yahoo is taking an inventive approach to presenting the news. The company is breaking it down into atoms:

Each story is created from multiple sources to present the essential bits and pieces of information, known as “atoms”. Atoms are key quotes, images, videos, maps, infographs, and Wikipedia excerpts among others. These atomic units provide a unique context to the news. Our stories are both algorithmically and hand curated to ensure high quality, and come with a textual summary.¹

The inception of Yahoo News Digest goes back to last year. Back in March of 2013, Yahoo acquired Summly, an iOS news app that used a combination of natural language processing and algorithms to pick out and deliver the important parts of news stories in a concise manner. Since the acquisition, Summly founder Nick D’Aloisio and his team have been working to fold many of these features into Yahoo products, and to create a standalone app: News Digest. D’Aloisio recently sat down with the guys at TheNextWeb to talk a bit about the new app. Among the many topics, D’Aloisio touched on the approach of News Digest, and what separates it from other similar apps:

We’re very different to other news apps in a number of ways. I’d almost argue we’re the antithesis.

We are definitive where they are personalized. We have a finite stream, where they have infinite streams. We’re twice per day, where they are updating consistently. We’re atomized and summarized whereas they tend to have in-depth article content.

Also, I’d argue that the use-case of digest is to inform the user, whereas the use case of others could arguably be for wasting time to be honest, if they want people in there for way longer than they should be.²

It is quite clear that Yahoo’s focus on mobile is starting to pay off. The company’s Weather app is great, and News Digest is already one of my favorite apps. This is an exciting time for Yahoo, and it will be really interesting to see what else they have coming.

By the way, D’Aloisio’s interview with TheNextWeb is incredibly interesting, and definitely worth a read.