Credit: Image by Mark Hakansson
Circa, the mobile-first news outlet that encourages readers to follow stories as a series of updates rather than longer-form articles, has upgraded its website to provide the same function from desktop computers.
Readers can now follow stories from the website and any changes or updates will be reflected in the app, where readers receive updates to stories as push notifications.
"We did have a web presence before but it was just a way to share stories from the app to Twitter or Facebook, " contributing editor Daniel Bentley told Journalism.co.uk. "We wanted the web experience to be as good as the mobile experience, or at least bring it in line with the mobile."
Rather than act as a replacement or equivalent to the Circa app, the website is intended to give people a way to read content "that's convenient for you but in a way that's optimised for short bursts of information rather than the long form," said Bentley.
"We're still very much focussed on mobile-first and making our stories suitable for mobile phones," he said, "but you might come across a Circa story that's being shared on Twitter when you're on your computer and you've clicked the link on Tweetdeck.
"Our stories are not designed to be standalone articles and you're not getting the best out of Circa if you just read the article once. We really want to encourage people to follow the stories that they're interested in and get further updates on them."
Bentley also revealed that an Android version of the Circa app is currently being tested in beta and will be released before the end of the year. A new version of the iOS app will also be released in the near future, once Apple launches the iOS 7 redesign.
"It's really pushing out a lot of features that we wanted in version one of the app," said Bentley of the second iOS iteration, "so version two is really going to kick on with that."
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