Earlier this year, I removed the google news tab on my phone’s homescreen. This wasn’t because it didn’t work, but rather that it worked too well. More often than not I found myself reading a story that caught my eye, and halfway through realizing that I didn’t care enough to keep reading.
Unfortunately, that is their goal. Most news feeds profit from your attention through ad revenue, so they’re designed to hold you captive. I realized that I value my time more than staying up to date on the latest news, so I quit.
However, I would still like to know what’s going on in our world.
The latest news, right in your DMs
My solution was to build a bespoke solution, aggregating news from pre-selected feeds and sticking it right in my DMs via SMS.
You fill out your profile, create a list of RSS feeds, schedule when you’d like your updates, and then oonu does the rest!
The amazing thing is that you can try this for free, check it out here!
Here’s one of the texts I was sent at the end of November 2024:
Hey Max! Your oonu news buddy here. Top 3 headlines this week for you:
- Trump May Find Things to Like About Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Foreign Policy, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/trump-biden-world.html
- F.T.C. Launches Antitrust Investigation Into Microsoft, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/technology/microsoft-ftc-antitrust.html
- Margrethe Vestager, the World’s Top Tech Cop, Is Making Her Exit, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/technology/margrethe-vestager-eu-antitrust.html
This was my quickest project yet from concepts to final product (Just under 1 month!). These were the technologies I built on top of:
Most news publications publish their latest headlines in the form of an RSS feed. For those that are unfamiliar with RSS, it is an xml format made specifically for pushing items with titles, descriptions, and links in a machine readable format.
While RSS consumption has mostly fallen out of date, I was pleased to discover that most major news organizations still support RSS outputs.
The good news is that Twilio makes in incredibly easy to create a service that sends SMS texts to a user base. SMS messages are also a wonderful communication tool in the US, because everyone has a phone number with unlimited messages, and opens their messaging app multiple times a day.
The bad news is that it is the most expensive part of this project.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gotten really good recently, with quite affordable APIs.
While I have mixed feelings about content generation, specifically around artistic composition, I have no problem using AI for aggregation. This service only provides news that is pulled from the RSS feeds, and cites each headline with it’s corresponding link.