1. Buzzfeed released a news app — and it’s a triumph of substance over listicles. The iOS-only app has a clean design and feature set for mobile, streamlined social sharing, and easy customization options. It’s relatively late to the game compared to the pared down and newly-free NYT Now, but will still likely be a contender for your home screen.
2. It’s sure hard for mobile apps to retain their user base. A recent study shows that the average Android app loses 90% of its daily active users (DAUs) within 30 days. Here’s a post explaining how the best apps remain sticky to avoid that fate.
3. Most people envision a distant, sinister future when they think about modern workplace automation. Truth is, it’s already here. Ben Brown points out that “creating customized, interactive automation tools for business tasks is possible with a little open source code, some cloud tools that are mostly free, and a bit of self reflection.” The last of these, of course, is the most difficult.
4. Twitter struggles to acquire and retain new users, and is releasing a series of changes to improve the logged-out experience. Launching in a few months, Project Lightning will highlight one of Twitter’s most compelling use cases: live events. This feature will show a list of events taking place that people are tweeting about, and serve up a human-curated list of the best tweets.
5. Now that most of us carry a videocamera wherever we go, a great deal more breaking news is captured via video. In partnership with Storyful, Google this week launched YouTube Newswire to provide a curated feed of the relevant, accurate eyewitness videos.

Weekend fun: What extraneous text appears in your website’s source code? For Jeb Bush’s new site this week, it was the plot of Die Hard. Website source code sometimes has more pleasant surprises, like job postings. I’ve linked this before, but this tumblr dedicated to code in TV and films is full of clever surprises.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.