@rrhoover +1 this question. with all the recent attention going to major investments in Buzzfeed and Vice, where do you see Circa fitting in? How do you compare yourselves to Vox?

@eriktorenberg @rrhoover Good questions guys. Re: news industry in the next 5 years. This one is really hard to answer. It's changed a monumental amount in the last five years, and for sure a lot in the last two since we started in the space. I think the amount of innovation and disruption in news over the next 5 years will be far more pronounced than ever before. The traditional way of doing things – articles, beats, field reporters, are all about to undergo major transformations. Especially as print dies or becomes a premium product. Re: Vox We're a wholly different beast. First and foremost we're mobile-first which is a major difference. All of our writers strongly consider what the reading experience of a story would be on mobile before anything else and that dramatically shifts how and what we cover. Additionally we're the only company that enables readers to follow the stories they care about and get granular updates as they happen over time. We see this as a significant differentiator vs. all of the rest of the apps and experiences that are out there. It really does feel like magic when you receive your first update to a story you're following.

@mg i had installed circa before and eventually uninstalled. Some stories even though they were related started to appear as new stories. How are you guys handle following thousands of different stories?

@jleebiz We've got our own process on the back-end that helps us stay clear with what stories we're covering. And sometimes related stories do pop up as new stories, but they're not covering identical subject matter. Such as if you take Ferguson – we may cover the incident, the response, and such things as militarized police in different threads.

@zackshapiro Thanks dude!

@dshan Of course. The Daily Brief is going to be a collection of the stuff that matters most, curated by our editors. The goal is to make sure you're never out of the loop. While the stories are the same as you'd find on the main screen, we call out a single point to make it really easy to not miss it. If you read a story from the main screen, it won't show up in your Brief so as to not confuse you...

@mg Ah, the highlighting a main point is a nice touch. I think I got nervous it was a step in the direction of other 'top ten news stories' approaches, like Yahoo's Digest, which is IMO a misfire. I love the customizability of story following on Circa (in contract to a hand-fed digest model). I also love the lack of emotive, clickbaity headlines, btw.

@dshan Oh HELL no. We're definitely not going down that path ever. Our goal is to inform, not show you some random list of stories. We want to surface the most meaningful stuff of the day in the hopes that you follow it and stick with it.

@mg I definitely knew you weren't going down that path:) I also know my girlfriend, for instance, isn't habitual, but is a frequent user. This kind of thing is a good way to surface high-value stories for her. Circa is the only app I use for news. It's so perfect. Killer work.

@ShaanVP Thanks! But that's kind of gross. I was pretty sure we cleaned up all the sweat before we shipped it. Shouldn't have passed QA...

@lylemckeany It's a great question, Lyle and something we take very seriously. We consider objectivity to be something very critical to Circa's mission – we want people to be informed, not influenced. As such it's core to everything we do. Because we write 100% of the news that is shown in Circa we know that we are personally responsible for whatever comes across. Our editors work in a completely collaborative environment – no one person "owns" a story, and every story is peer reviewed. Over time, as stories are updated, any potential bias gets washed out because of this kind of collaboration. It's kind of an incredible process. While there is certainly the likelihood that some people have "perceived bias" around something they don't like, we do our absolute damnedest to remain objective on the news we produce.

@eric3000 Thanks Eric. We've got it on our list and will get it in there as soon as we can!

@eric3000 Love to hear all of this, Eric! Thanks so much.

@jtriest Thanks Jonathon!

@mulligan Woo hoo! Thanks man.

@thisisjorik Jorik, that's definitely not something that should be happening. Shoot us an email to support@cir.ca and we'll have a look!

@SacBookReviewer Ross, we solve 100% of the problem you're referring to in your first paragraph. You really set us up for a knock out of the park on that one ;) Regarding your second statement...just curious what kind of syndication you're referring to? Someone else using Circa's content elsewhere? Just want to be clear here...

@mg Yes that was the question - are you going to be doing syndication (not that we're interested, just curious). Loaded it and now its stuck on one of the onboarding screens for a couple of minutes with the "loading" marker at the top of the screen. Screen won't respond to any input. Going to shut it down and relaunch.

@dannyjespinoza That's definitely something we're working on.

@mariosundar Thanks Mario! We take our notifications so very seriously and want it to be one of the apps people actually leave them on!

@alexhorre You're not the only one, but it's a limited set. There are so many things to balance here – readability of text, visual cue of the image, scanability of headlines (and therefore info density) and a few other elements. We went through quite a few iterations before landing on this one. And whereas we're big fans of the new checkmark when you've read a story and would like to preserve that space, we'll be looking into ways to improve this view.

@alexhorre Totally agree with you. It's super hard to skim, but mainly due to the transparency. It's sort of subliminal. If my brain sees content that it can't see/read then it automatically goes into a sort of freak out mode and almost refuses to go on further.

@merket I hate freak out brain mode. Rest assured, we're on it and this is by no means the end of designing Circa ;)