How New Social Networks Plan To Shrink The Internet To One Meaningful Story Per Day

I follow 882 accounts on Twitter that together have produced 92 tweets within the last 10 minutes. For all I know, there might be an evergreen pearl of content mixed in with these 92 tweets, but looking for it seems overwhelming. There’s just too much to sift through. Two new social networks think they have an answer for this conundrum: They allow users to post only once per day.

One of them, This. (spelled with a period), is launching an iPhone app on May 21. Named for the Internet shorthand for "read this," it was born inside of Atlantic Media but has since spun out to become its own company. Its founder, Andrew Golis, who was formerly an "entrepreneur in residence" at the media company, says it has signed up about 10,000 users since launching in November 2014. The other startup, Catchpool, is a scrappy independent site that launched its beta version in May of 2014. Its founder, Erica Berger, says a few thousand people have signed up for the beta version. This. is like a social network turned inside out. Its bet is that advertisers care not only that people see their ads, but what state of mind they’re in when they do. Just as publishers spend time on quality content that, on Facebook and Twitter, flies by in exactly the same way as a post about what its author ate for lunch, there’s not a social network to place the type of ad that might have once gone in a glossy magazine.