The New York Times is developing a social news service in collaboration with Betaworks, the technology company that created bit.ly and TweetDeck, paidContent.org reported today.

The personalised service, called News.me, will be initially launched only for iPad and it is expected to be available later this year. According to Betaworks' chief executive officer John Borthwick, the company has been developing the app for six months, The New York Times revealed.

"We're abstracting from that a vision of how social sharing and the real-time Web are going to influence the news consumption experience," vice president of research and development at The Times Company Michael Zimbalist said. However, besides the honeycomb logo available on the website, no further details on how the service is going to work were revealed.

Earlier this year, The New York Times invested, along with AOL and Lerer Media Ventures, in Betaworks. The newspaper also sold to the technology company the prototype that it had developed for News.me, paidContent explained.

Popular microblogging service Twitter announced the launch of a free iPad application late Wednesday night, The New York Times reported. Twitter for iPad will let users tap away messages on the 9.7 inch touchscreen while any related content (such as pictures, websites or videos) will be available in a separate window, according to MSNBC.

In a company blog post Leland Rechis, Twitter's user interface designer, stressed that Twitter for iPad makes use of the tablet's "fluid touch interface" so that users can move around information "smoothly and quickly" without the need for opening multiple windows or clicking buttons.

Since users do not know where links that are featured in the 140-character Tweets will lead to, iPad's Flipboard application takes care of the problem by copying the links and adding visual content from the site. Users can also pinch another user's Tweet to obtain more information on the author and wipe down with two fingers to look at conversation threads, Reuters says.

The Washington Post plans to launch its iPad app "in the coming weeks," following The New York Times' and Wall Street Journal's efforts on the Apple device, The Upshot reported.

"Mobile continues to be a key distribution platform for our content, utility for our readers, and, a core enabler of our growing digital business," Ken Babby, chief revenue officer and general manager for Washington Post Digital stated in a staff e-mail Wednesday.

Photo: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

"The usage of the Post's iPhone app continues to accelerate," Babby added. He also announced the new mobile leadership team, including former AOL executive Beth Jacobs as general manager for mobile, as well as the Post's Neil Quinn as director for mobile commercial products.

There is no firm date yet on the iPad app release but it's expected some time in the fall, according to a Post spokeswoman, The Upshot reported.

"Newspapers have 12 years or less left to live in print," according to the digital consultant Ross Dawson, who will speak in the Newspaper Publishers' Association forum in Sydney, Australia this Thursday, mUmBRELLA reported.

According to a NPA release, Dawson said: "By 2022 newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant in Australia. However the leading newspaper publishers of today may have transformed themselves to thrive in what will be a flourishing media industry," The Australian reported.

Photo: Pranav Mistry

He predicted that within 10 years, mobile reading devices would become our "primary news interfaces', and the price to consumers of such devices would greatly drop. For example, Apple's iPad, which cost $629 or more today, would be charged only less than $10, and even often be given away.

"More sophisticated news readers will be foldable or rollable, gesture controlled and fully interactive."

"Substantial parts of investigative journalism, writing and news production will be 'crowdsourced' to hordes of amateurs overseen by professionals," Dawson added, The Australian reported.