One of the leading RSS Aggregation startups, NewsGator Technologies, jumped on the Facebook bandwagon today with NewsFriends (add to Facebook here) – a social news application where Facebook users can aggregate and share news, videos and podcasts. Once you have it installed, you can select friends and it automatically delivers you the news they are reading. You can also pick packages of popular feeds selected by NewsGator editors, or add news feeds directly.
The latest news stories display on your profile page, and by opening the app you can browse all your news feeds. You can post any news story and your comments to your profile, or send to a friend. Video and audio podcasts play inside NewsFriends.
It seems like a nice app – although for power RSS readers, it won’t replace your RSS Reader or even your Start Page. But as a complement to those tools (which are NewsGator’s bread and butter, after all), NewsFriends is a nifty little Facebook app. I could see myself using it to track a few social feeds, say my friends or family. For actual news, I’m afraid I don’t use Facebook enough for it to satisfy my craving for constant tech news.
One note: the press release has the best use of the trendy new phrase “social graph” that I’ve yet seen – it says that NewsFriends will allow bloggers to “expand their readership by tapping into the social graph of their current readers”. Right on! Here are some screenshots:
Homepage of NewsFriends app
Adding friends
Adding news
