Today, personalized news app News360 made another leap from tablets and smartphones to the desktop. A new browser plugin called Periscope brings some of the service’s news aggregation features to bigger screens and helps readers get deeper context and perspective on news stories.
The plugin, which is now available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, detects news stories and displays a slim toolbar across the top of the browser window with links to related stories from other outlets. That bar can be expanded to show more stories, complete with big, fancy thumbnail images and related tweets.
News360 aggregates headlines from a wide variety of sources and generates recommendations using semantic analysis both of your reading habits and of your activity on Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and elsewhere.
It’s that extensive personalization that sets the service apart from something like Flipboard, which has been hugely popular since launching on the iPad, but has been slow to adopt new features and expand to new platforms. Most of Flipboard’s recent announcements have been about content partnerships, until today, when they launched personal accounts and a handful of other features.
This summer, News360 expanded its functionality from pure aggregation to more of a personalized news application, bringing it into more direct competition with apps like Flipboard and Zite. At that time, they also launched a beta of their desktop app.
More recently, a number of established tech companies have jumped into the personalized news game. AOL launched Editions, followed by Yahoo’s Livestand. Next in line is Google, who is rumored to be preparing a personalized news app for tablets code-named Propellor.
