A couple more thoughts that came to mind since I wrote this post for Shareable about The Daily, and how it completely misses the point of the iPad and social media.

The question you've got to ask with any new technology is, what problem does it solve? The problem the iPad solves is 1) most of our reading is now done on a screen and 2) reading large bodies of text while sitting at a computer fucking sucks. Computers still suffer from the vestigial design limitations of the unwieldy terminals that spawned them--they're devices to enter commands and data into, not read on. Sure, they've evolved to do other things (poorly), but they're still only a stopgap solution for consuming text/audio/video online. The iPad, with its tactile interface and slim, magazine-like form factor is an imperfect but improved device for reading text on the Internet.

So what problem does The Daily and Conde Nast's apps-as-glorified-PDF's solve for the user? They offer less functionality than comparable news websites, which already look great in Mobile Safari. Instapaper already offers the definitive offline reading solution (as far s I can tell, The Daily doesn't even have an offline mode, rendering it particularly pointless.) The problems they theoretically solve exist entirely on the publishers' side: it's easy to repurpose content, control its use, and cling to the old media business models. But in what way are any of these things advantageous to the user? They're not, yet the publishers are charging a premium for a substandard product that is easily bested by free web content through Mobile Safari and cheap or free archiving or aggregation apps like Flipboard, Instapaper and Reeder.

Aside from Murdoch's octogenarian peers who bring iPads to Davos but don't know how to use them, for whom is The Daily compelling or useful?