Why Curation is the natural form of Mobile Publishing

For a long time, Mobile Internet was a “baby internet” as Steve Jobs called it, the day the iPhone was launched. The first smartphones were not very smart as they didn’t support “real” HTML browsing nor many of the Web technologies that made online experiences rich and useful. Obviously, the iPhone changed that and enabled a lot of these great Web experience to become mobile, on top of enabling the creation of many others. But one area that still struggles with mobile is content publishing. For content format that are by essence “mobile”, no problem: photos, short videos, tweets, position/check-ins, status updates… But so far, this has excluded any publishing activity involving long form / richer content, such as creating a story and updating a blog.

Curation is an opportunity to change that.

Curation is a publishing activity where the time is spent sourcing, reading, selecting, editing and sharing content; rather than creating it. Because most of us already do that as part of our daily routines to keep track with our areas of interest, it is an efficient way for everyone to become a publisher, especially on the Scoop.it platform where these tasks were not only optimized for curators but also nicely integrated in a simple user experience. Now, while long form content creation will remain hard to do on mobile, all of the tasks involved in being a curator can actually be done on today’s smartphones :
– Most content sources are available on Mobile or in a Mobile-friendly format,
– Reading already happens in a big way on Mobile and is likely to develop as new technology such as Instapaper’s or Flipboard’s spread out,
– Editing is lighter than writing as usually involves short-form commentary, rather than long-form analysis or creation,
– Sharing is built-in: phones are communication devices.
Sometimes the mere technical possibilities of things is not enough to create a new usage. But in this case, the Scoop.it users made it loud and clear: the request for a Mobile App has been the top request on our feedback forum ever since we had one. It makes perfect sense: as you’ve told us, once you get started on the Scoop.it platform, curation becomes integrated in your daily routine, as a key part of your social media experience. And for many of us if not all, our daily routine and social media experience growingly involves mobile: because we move but also because we live and work in a different way than before, being constantly connected. We want to fill these idle moments to do something meaningful: our days are simply to short if we don’t.

So today, we’re very pleased to be the first curation platform to become Mobile, launching Scoop.it on the iPhone.

Developing it, our focus has been to respect the core values of the Scoop.it platform: simplicity, visual appeal, efficiency. As you use it, you’ll be able to leverage the suggestions you’ve configured for your topic as well as other users’. The publishing window is essentially the same as the web site’s and offer the same multi-sharing opportunities. Even the bookmarklet can be installed on your iPhone and used in the same way as on your computer. But the best thing might be this: no one will be able to tell the posts published using the iPhone App from the ones published using your PC. Both will enjoy the same nice magazine layout, when seen by one of your readers. Mobile Internet started to be successful when it became usable without compromising on quality: our goal has been the same, applying that to curation and publishing.

Fan of curation? We hope you’ll like curating on-the-go.

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