News360, a personalized news reader on the major mobile and tablet platforms, has added Google Plus integration using the newly released Google Plus API. News360 started off as a simple aggregator, but its 2.0 version launched in August added machine learning smarts to crawl users’ feeds and learn what topics interest them.
News360 now personalizes the news using Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Evernote and Google Plus, providing a comprehensive picture of a user’s interests. The developers found that the long, in-depth updates users post on Google Plus are rich in semantic data that can improve personalization. The personalization syncs between the tablet and the desktop Web version, but the mobile versions don’t have it yet.
Rather than using social data to recommend stories just because your friends liked them, News360 creates a semantic map of what stories actually say, determining relevance to the user based on the content itself.
Flipboard also uses semantic data in this way, but it mainly presents content from feeds selected by the user. News360 is more analogous to Google News, except its personalization is much more closely tailored to the user’s interest graphs, thanks to its integration with so many services.
After analyzing the services you add, News360 presents a list of topics based on the data it crawls. You can then manually remove topics or add more, and topics can be individually tweaked with more tags to make them more precise.
News360 pulls in stories from all over the Web, and it displays a preview of the story that comes highlighted with key terms, related photos, and coverage from other sources. Clicking to expand the preview takes the user to the original source page.
With the addition of Google Plus to the suite of crawled services, News360 now has access to a wealth of user conversations with a variety of audiences. There are so many services that recommend stories because your friends linked to them or liked them, but News360 is uniquely equipped to recommend them based on what they actually say.
Check out the free News360 app for all major device platforms, or try the Web version.
