News360 is one of a number of apps that aim to redefine the way we consume online news. Today marks the launch of an improved version of the app which sees it analyze data from your accounts on a number of other services to offer you an even more tailored experience.
As we noted when we covered the launch of its iPad app earlier this year, News360 uses intelligent linking to automatically give you the background to news stories across a wide range of categories, from world news to tech, crime and sports.
Now, the newly updated version for iPad and Android Honeycomb tablets allows you to hook up your Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and Google Reader accounts to get a better idea of who you are and what you’re interested in.
The service takes into account your ‘Likes’, bookmarks, subscriptions, and the items you share to gain a deeper understanding of your interests. Simultaneously, it ‘matchmakes’ you with suitable news, taking into account the quality of the writing, tone, subject, source, author and more.
This, so the theory goes, should mean you get news that interests you, selected from over 5000 sources, every time you go to the ‘My Interests’ section.
Analyzing you accounts takes around one minute, after which you get a range of automated categories. For me, for example, it chose things like ‘Internet’, ‘Software’, ‘Gadgets’ and ‘Media’ – all bang on. The only category it went wrong on was sport – I’m really not a fan. Beyond categories, it picks out subjects it thinks you’ll like too. So, in the Internet category, it picked subjects like Google, Facebook and Foursquare, for example. All its automated selections can be manually customized too – I ditched the sport.
Meanwhile, News360 is now available on the Web for the first time, featuring the same interest graph analysis as the tablet versions. It’s a solid reproduction of the app, and synchronizes with your settings from the handheld ones, in a clear play to make this your main source of news, wherever you are.
Whether you make it your go-to news aggregator or not is totally down to personal choice. Others may prefer the clean minimalism of Google News, for example, or the far more socially influenced selections of Flipboard. When we covered News360 last, I said that I got the feeling that it will be a much more enticing proposition in a few months’ time – it seems that prediction has come true.
The updated News360 tablet apps are available today, as is the Web app. The versions for iPhone, Android smartphones, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry are set to be updated to include the new features soon.
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