App Mines Social Sites To Customize News
The words “trust” and “intimacy” don’t normally spring to mind when talking about a news app, but it’s hard to talk about News360 without bringing them up right away. That’s because in order for this app to function to complete effect, the user needs to do some fairly serious opening up him or herself — not quite the therapist’s couch or the lover’s embrace, but still enough to give one pause.
At its heart, News360 is a news aggregator that can be customized around the user’s tastes and past media consumption patterns. The sticky side is that in order to ascertain these tastes and patterns, the user needs to give News360 access to his or her major social media accounts — Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, specifically — along with Google Reader and Evernote. That done, its software crawls through that long history of retweets, likes and visited articles and starts to assemble a feed that’s more in line with the user’s tastes.
Under the hood, News360 is powered by a semantic analysis engine that its developers first worked with on the language processing front, then found could be adapted to better understanding news stories and their readers. Within the app, Karachinsky said it functions on two levels. First, it goes through individual news articles to identify the people, locations and companies within, as well as where they fit within a range of over 2,500 potential topics. It also takes into account where the story is coming from in terms of its source’s stature and credibility.
Then, it follows that same process to look at the user. “Whatever you like on Facebook and share with your friends, whatever you tweeted on Twitter, we will actually go in and look at the text behind the links, look at the full article that you shared and then aggregate all of that … and then understand your more long-term, persistent interests,” Karachinsky said.
For those who bristle at the thought of opening up the doors to their social media accounts to News360’s software, Karachinsky said that news preferences can be set within the app, though he warned that the process might not be nearly as efficient or thorough.
On the revenue front, News360 isn’t currently being monetized. “We’re venture funded and we’re trying to get as many people using it as possible first before we try and understand what’s the best way to monetize it,” Karachinsky said. But he did look forward to a not-too-distant future of working with content providers, especially smaller, more narrowly focused entities, with a goal of helping to connect them with a larger audience.
“We think we can try to make it easier simply by looking at this content and then finding the right segment of our own audience and just channeling it to them,” he said.
This is turn may enable those media providers to better monetize their own content by attracting a larger audience and working up to more premium advertising levels, Karachinsky said. He speculated that one potential revenue stream might be a share for advertising with the content providers where News360 might take a 10%-30% cut. “Because the advertising would have a larger volume and hopefully a more effective CPM, that would be a very good proposition both for them and for us,” he said.
“We want content creators to view us as a distribution platform,” Karachinsky said. “But our goal right now as a company is to find the best product that we can deliver and to create something that will really make lives easier and then move on to making money.”
Vendor: News360
Launched: October 2010
Cost to consumers: Free
Compatible devices: iPad, iPhone, Android tablets and phones, Blackberry Playbook, desktop
White label version: No
Number of downloads: 800,000
Key characteristics: News360 creates a customized news feed for users based on past preferences and persistent interests. Its experience is optimized when users give the app access to their Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Google Reader and Evernote accounts to collect personal data, though preferences can be manually set within the app, too. The app currently culls from 15,000 news sites and aims to grow that number perpetually.
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