Name: Smartr
Quick Pitch: Smartr is a news reader for Twitter on the iPhone.
Genius Idea: Web denizens are turning to social sites to find and consume news more and more. Smartr, an iPhone app released in mid-December, is going after the social news crowd who turn to Twitter for their daily news fix.
Smartr for iPhone [iTunes link], which comes from natural language processing startup Factyle, gathers all the tweets in your Twitter timeline and determines which of them have meaningful content. The app then fetches the web pages housed within tweets and optimizes the content — text, images and video — for iPhone.
Instead of seeing tweets, the Smartr user views a Twitter feed filled with news snippets. “It’s a lens on top of your Twitter Feed,” says Factyle founder Temo Chalasani.
Users can click on updates in the filtered Twitter stream to read a Smartr reformatted, ad-free version of the article, share it with Facebook, Tumblr or Posterous, and choose to save it in-app or via Instapaper or Read it Later.
The application is best suited for news junkies who want an experience that automatically filters out checkins, badges, stickers and updates of the same ilk — updates the startup considers “Twitter spam.”
Poorly formatted articles with excessive ads will also get caught in Smartr’s spam filter, according to Chalasani.
The still-nascent application has a small but highly engaged audience, says Chalasani. App users are making Smartr their primary way of consuming content, and the team added in support for Twitter lists after...
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