"Today's headline" application enables a big explosion of user growth and activity

Summary: Tencent Science and technology Zong July 26 If you look closely, since this year, your microblog and the timeline of micro-trust friends often appear a news message with (share from the @ today's headlines) or "Today's headline" XXXX News links, these points

Tencent Science and Technology Zong July 26 Report

If you look closely, since this year, the timeline of your microblog and Twitter friends has often featured a news link (from the @ today's headline) or "Today's headline" XXXX, which comes from a recommendation class called today's headline.

With Tencent, Sina four portals of the news client mainly by manual editing and recommend different, "Today's headline" is a "no small" information recommendation class application, through the technical means of the user's microblog information and usage from multiple dimensions analysis, based on their interest preferences to the user to recommend users may be interested in information.

From Weibo, back to Weibo and micro-mail. User information Acquisition--Personalized information recommendation--micro-credit and micro-blog sharing the organic combination of these links to form a positive cycle of the closed loop, "Today's headlines" application has also achieved a large user growth and activity.

"Today's headlines," the recommendation and sharing mechanism to please a group of mobile Internet high-end users, Sina CEO Cao Chao, Millet Technology CEO lei (Micro Bo), Sogou CEO Wang Xiaoquan, angel investor Xiaoping and many other media, scientific and technological, investment industry, the big stars are using this application.

According to a growth curve within the headline today, social media sharing is closely correlated with user growth.

"Our active users have grown 4 times times this year." The founder of today's headline application, byte-beating CEO Zhang Yixi recently revealed to Tencent Technology.

As a startup product, today's headlines are not the most active in all news clients, but users share the fastest growth. In particular, in the first half of this year, "Today's headlines" played a role in bridging the movement of users away from micro-blogging to micro-credit, with the discovery of information on microblogs being forwarded to the Circle of micro-trust friends through "Today's headlines." "said one of the operators working on the news client.

Influenced by multiple factors, such as regulation and copyright, news aggregation and editing are big media (such as four major portals) only play the turn, start-up companies can not jump out of the shackles of resources and regulation to reach the top of the industrial chain. However, like the "Today's headlines" Such applications, in addition to its information recommendation mechanism is worth learning, in the news information applications today, with the help of social media to achieve large growth, but also to the industry contributed to the information selection and recommend some inspiration.

Social media sharing big break

Social media sharing is not a new topic, and it's not easy to have a lasting share of the content.

On top of social media, it's more common to have viral sharing, such as the crazy guessing picture, which was very hot in the last few days. This year, the Dragon Boat Festival before and after very fire, users of the micro-trust Circle of friends are full of help guessing figure answer.

The characteristics of viral sharing is the speed of transmission, swarm-style, but users look more tired, people are easily disgusted. Sure enough, "crazy guess picture" After a fire, then to silence.

The sharing of today's headlines is a kind of information sharing, relatively lasting.

Zhang Yixi that viral-sharing is a marketing tool, but information sharing is not. It is a part of the user's needs. If the sharing button is turned off, the user would like to share the information can not go out, will be very depressed. Products need to meet the needs of users to share.

The buttons to share social media are also standard for many applications. Many news clients share the source of "XX news" in the Circle of micro-trust friends. "Today's headlines" further, not only the "today's headline" source, but the "today's headline" Red icon, the news is presented with "" Today's headline "XXXXXX", compared to other news clients, more conducive to the realization of their own brand awareness.

On the other hand, information is more willing to be shared by users than news in the information and user's strong correlation. The news clients of four major portals focus on social and entertainment news, and today's headlines focus more on information about users.

"It's enough for average users to watch two or three news a day, but the information is different." Zhang Yixi Special emphasis on the difference between news and information.

In his view, those who increase the understanding of the state of society, "Today's headlines" will be covered, but not news-oriented. For example, this day and tomorrow will greet the heaviest rainstorm, this information for users, is not enough to understand, he will think today to take an umbrella. This information is not only known to the user, but also helps the user's life.

Multidimensional mining based on user information

Tencent and other four portals have launched a news client application, are artificial editing, supplemented by the user to subscribe to the traditional media, from the media and other content sources, "Guess you Like" also become part of the client's functional modules.

Unlike the news clients of these portals, today's headline is the main information mining path. Information collection and recommendation are achieved through technical means, the user on the micro-blog on the speech, geographical, forwarding, and he has a direct or indirect relationship between the friends to the user to play a number of tags or attributes to achieve. More than the proportion of mining SNS information, mining machines continue to learn the user in the use of "today's headlines" every action, such as time, location and other information, and constantly increase the attributes of people, so as to achieve through the technical definition of people more accurate.

If you are a user who has used more than two times in the headlines today, you will find that these two launches are significantly different. After the first application, the application recommended to his information has a strong correlation with his microblog information, two times after the launch, the recommendation information than the first degree of precision to further. In the latest version, "Today's headlines" can let users decide to like this information, users do not like the information can be removed, after several "tuning", "Today's headlines" is the user's own personalized headlines.

How can information mining be more extreme than other applications? Zhang Yixi that he is not what kind of secret cheats, but more refined to carry out a variety of information mining attempts, and constantly refined the granularity of information, while improving the signal-to-noise ratio of information. "The law is very complex and dynamic, it is difficult to fully approximate the law, but always can be approached." In the process, just get closer. ”

Of course, today's headlines are not a day's work. The Zhang Yixi has been in the early days of information mining and has been in the pipeline for four or five years. Earlier in the meal as a technical partner, he was responsible for real-time search, hot word mining, Peoplerank had some experiments, accumulated a lot of social data analysis technology, and then in the real estate site 99 room, also did a variety of automated classification experiments.

"I've looked at at least 100 of the products in this direction until I've been concerned about getting information. "he said.

In terms of content, all the information in today's headlines relies on crawling to other content sources. At this level, "Today's headlines" are more like the role of content source distribution channels, while crawling content, you can also display the content source of its own pages, including advertising, etc., with the capture and distribution mechanism to drive content sources and "Today's headlines" to work together to enrich the coverage of today's headlines. Zhang Yixi revealed that by the end of this year, content sources will be doubled.

But there is no denying that the original production capacity without content, the lack of content quantity and quality control, will become a potential risk in today's headlines. In contrast, the news clients of the four major portals have not put their focus on information mining, but they have accumulated rich experience on the content and supervision issues.

However, in the present day, such as "Today's headline" is good at doing information mining and good at organizing users to participate in the sharing of cutting-edge applications, has exploded the value of social media sharing. In this sense, the impact of the news client and technology mining with rich experience in human editing can also provide a new competitive experimental field for the news client application that is about to be caught in the homogeneous competition.