Njuice is the latest news aggregation service to hit the market, launching this week in open beta.
The Swedish startup’s platform constitutes a website and iOS app, scanning Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms in real-time, tapping predictive algorithms that surface trending stories before they break.
“We built Njuice to help navigate the ever-increasing flood of news out there,” says Andreas Thorstensson, founder and lead developer of the service. “By using Njuice, the articles you care about find you instead of the other way around, it’s truly addictive.”
Thorstensson actually has an interesting past – he’s the former Counter-Strike world champion, and he’s also the founder of SK Gaming, a successful professional gaming organization. He also founded SPRAYdio, an early streaming music service and community and Geekboys, an early RSS aggregation service that launched in 1999.
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Njuice is designed to be a quick and intuitive way of discovering news, and judging by the mobile app they’ve put a lot of work into the service.
You can choose to view news by category – Business, World News, Lifestyle, Sports, Technology or ‘Other’, or simply select ‘All’.
You can also view ‘Most Shared’, or what’s starting to trend ‘Right Now’:
Though it’s not mandatory, you can set yourself up with an account for more personalized news, and integrate your account with Facebook and Instapaper:
Our initial tinkerings reveal a very nice app, with a beautiful design. But with so many other news aggregation services out there (e.g. Flipboard and Pulse), does Njuice bring anything new to the table?
I’d say it does. Many of the existing services tap the social graph to surface news for you, and they rely on you following the right people and news outlets. Some are also restricted by only reeling in data from a set number of publications, which won’t necessarily give you all the news. In other words, they often don’t surface news you “didn’t know you were interested in,” as Thorstensson puts it.
“Njuice works in real-time, if someone shares an article this second we know this and can publish breaking stories within seconds,” he adds. “We don’t publish your personal feed once an hour or so, everything changes instantly. Njuice uses semantic data to detect exactly what you are interested in. Most other services rely on the social graph.”
What does this mean? Well, if you love sport but hate cricket, you can still receive news around football, rugby, tennis and so on.
Ultimately, you don’t need existing social network accounts to get a decent feed of news. As soon as you launch the app, it’s good to go.
While Njuice is only available for the Web, iPhone and iPad at present, an Android release is imminent. And if you want to delve a little deeper into the tech behind it, you can do so here.
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