Personalised newsreader News360 launches web app

News360, a personalised news discovery platform, launched a web app on Friday to let users access their curated news feed on desktop.

Along with Zite and Flipboard and a number of other apps, News360 is a personalised newsreader offering people a place to discover new content around topics of interest, and is another platform digital publishers should be aware of as their articles may appear within the app.

The web platform is designed to provide an "infinite stream" of news based on readers' choices and preferences, in the same way as News360's mobile and tablet apps, but based on people's reading habits for the web, said chief executive Roman Karachinsky.

"We designed this layout as an infinite stream of content that tries to arrange itself based on how much relevance we think a particular story has to you," Karachinsky told Journalism.co.uk.

"The ones that are more attuned to your interests are going to be larger and others that are still relevant maybe a bit out there where we try to bring a bit of serendipity, they'll be a bit smaller."



As with News360's mobile or tablet app, readers can sign in to read articles, adjust their topic choices and "like" or "dislike" articles on the web app. Any changes will then be reflected across all devices on the same account.

"We try to make little adjustments based on screen size," Karachinsky said. "On the phone it might surface shorter stories and on desktops and tablets it'll be stories that are longer and take a bit more time to read, just because we know that sessions are longer and people will spend more time with the app."

For mobile, said Karachinsky, users tend to spend very short periods of time on the app but with a greater frequency, whereas on tablet – and now desktop – users visit less often but spend a lot more time browsing and reading articles. As such, a greater emphasis has been placed on the personalisation options in the web app to let readers fine tune their experience.

"We designed an interface for configuring all of these things to be better attuned to spending more time with it," he said, "to designing really complex categories that, in some cases, have dozens and dozens of different topics or companies or people that you're following."

Last September, News360 formed official partnerships with more than 30 news organisations and now the app "indexes and analyses" 100,000 sources from around the world providing 250,000 articles each day, according to a press release accompanying the announcement of the web app.

For a list of personalised apps and aggregaters see this article.

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