How do we come up with ideas for filters? It’s simple. First we try to forget everything we know about the news. We want a clean slate. Then we sit back and ponder what we really care most about the news.

As it turns out, we’ve got a few ideas to start:

•  We care about topics—issues, ideas, beats, and debates are all topics.

•  We care about people—sources, celebrities, organizations, businesses, governments, reporters, experts, bloggers, and our friends are all people or newsmakers generally.

•  We care about events—elections, revolutions, disasters, bankruptcies, and baseball games are all events.

•  We care about places—nations, cities, towns, neighborhoods, museums, restaurants, and parks are all places.

•  We care about facts, trust, recency, authority, and popularity too.

How do we come up with ideas for visualizations? It’s simple. First we recall all the filters we built to catch the bits and pieces of the news we care most about. Then we sit back sit back and ponder how those bits and pieces relate, combine, and inform one another.

So we’re going to build filters. And we’re going to build visualizations and other tools—rich, open, and dead-simple social experiences for discovery, sharing, insight, curation, and maybe even collaboration. We will probably never be done. But if we ever get close, we’ll have have broken the news apart and given you the tools to put it back together again with your pals.

That’s super important: It’s trendy to deploy fancy algorithms to slice and dice all manner of unstructured news data. And for good reason. But the real value lies in the end-user experience. It’s hard to put all that sliced and diced news back together again—and in a way that adds value and allows users to create their own value among their own communities and within their own conversations. That’s our vision of news as a platform.