On Monday, LinkedIn announced the acquisition of Newsle, a service that delivers you information about which of your friends are in the news.
Crucially, Newsle aggregates news not just from your LinkedIn contacts, but people you know from Facebook and Twitter as well.
That works for people like me: I’m much more active on Twitter than on LinkedIn in a professional context, but it’s almost impossible to keep track of what all my friends are up to.
With the Newsle acquisition, LinkedIn is increasing its investment in the confluence of professional identity and news. The new addition comes on the heels of other LinkedIn feature updates, including the ability to post article on the site, add images and documents to your profile, read and follow news with Pulse, and keep up with friends’ job changes and work anniversaries with LinkedIn Connected.
The latest update to LinkedIn Connected emphasizes news updates about LinkedIn contacts in a manner that’s very similar to Newsle, suggesting that LinkedIn was keenly aware of what Newsle was doing.
The LinkedIn team will also gain a handful of machine learning experts that have experience in analyzing news stories while parsing information in a detailed way—for instance, Newsle can tell the difference between my byline, a story that links to my byline, or one that I’m quoted in.
In a blog post today, LinkedIn said:
For the last three years, Newsle has leveraged its disambiguation, natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to build an extremely compelling product that finds blogs and articles that mention you or anyone you care about – colleagues, bosses, industry thought leaders, etc. – and notifies you seconds after they’ve published. We’re excited to work with Newsle’s team to combine this technology with our core assets and build experiences that continue to make you and millions of other professionals more productive and successful.
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
