News360, the people behind a number of news aggregation apps which we’ve covered previously, has today launched a browser plugin designed to give extra context to the news stories you read across the Web.
Once installed, Periscope hides away in your browser until you visit a news story. Then it pops up to give you a broader view of the story – just like a periscope.
It provides links to alternative reports of the story from other sources initially, but click the arrow icon and it expands to display related videos and a live stream of related tweets. You can share stories directly to Google+, Facebook and Twitter and save articles to your News360 account to read later.
The plugin also adds links into the news story itself. These then provide additional information and context for companies, people, places and the like which News360’s servers track. This pulls from the same database of over 70,000 entities that is used by the mobile apps.
In practice, the app worked well on the stories we tried it with. The amount of content it displays obviously depends on how big the story you’re reading is. If you have a strong interest in current affairs, it’s well worth trying and provides useful extra information and context to your online news consumption. Periscope is available for Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
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