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.
Trover, a free mobile app for exploring places through photos, has launched an Android version after a good start on iOS in July. The Seattle-based startup is focused on what it calls "spatial browsing." Trover is a photo-sharing app that arranges discoveries on a map, so that users can either explore sights right around them or browse places around the world.
"Most of the apps out there today that are location-specific are delivering lists of content back to the user," says CEO Jason Karas. "We feel that exploring a space is not really done best through lists, that it's done through information that's organized in a spatial way. You can literally stroll around with our UI and take in the neighborhood just like you would when you're walking around."
Digg has made the beta of Digg Newsrooms available to the public. Newsrooms are topical channels (like Technology, Politics or Entertainment) that use awards as incentives to motivate users to curate them. Users cannot currently create their own newsroom, but Digg says it is "interested in exploring" the option.
Newsrooms display an activity feed showing Diggs and buries by individual users in the newsroom. They also implement the Newswire, released in August, which surfaces more stories and user activity. Digg has gone all in with the complete overhaul it launched last year to make Digg more social, despite user uprisings and declining traffic influence. Newsrooms are part of the effort to double down. Can Digg pull it off?
Thoora, your robot buddy for exploring and sharing topics on the Web, is coming to Android tablets, and maybe even to your new Kindle Fire. Thoora's new app, optimized for Android 3.0, is available in the Android Market now for free. The team plans to submit to the Amazon Appstore after testing on a Kindle Fire, and an iPad version and smartphone apps are coming before the end of the year.
The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.
Uber-hyped question and answer site Quora has finally released its long-awaited iPhone app today and it's ok. I wish it was better but I'll probably use it more than the website. As expected, location is a big part of it, though I wish location was more granular and involved automated categorization.
That's not really the biggest let-down though. There are a number of other issues with it. TechCrunch's MG Siegler says he's been testing the app for days, yet he didn't offer any critique of it in his write-up. So I thought I'd focus on three things I've noticed this morning that I wish were better.
Feedly just launched version 6.0 of its free RSS reader for desktop Web browsers, Android and iOS. The app can now act as a client for your Tumblr account. You can read and reblog posts from within the colorful reader. It also sports some new curated topics, called "essentials," ranging from "Apple" and "Data Visualization" to "Do It Yourself" and "Gardening." Visually, the minimal app has teamed up with Vladstudio to provide some cute and colorful themes.
Feedly has also gotten more social. Previous versions had buggy sharing features, but those have been fixed, and today's release also adds Google Plus integration. Finally, the new features all sync across platforms, between the plug-ins for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and the mobile apps for phones and tablets.
What was once awesome and useful is now filled with dogs in costumes and photos of donuts.
Trailblazing social bookmarking service Delicious relaunched this morning under new management: Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, the co-founders of YouTube who bought the neglected service from Yahoo earlier this year. The plan is to make the service appealing to a larger number of mainstream users. So far it's pretty underwhelming.
When Yahoo bought Delicious years ago, I was disappointed it wasn't the Library of Congress that made the acquisition. It was that useful. Now this new Delicious looks like just another Web 2.0 startup.
What do you do after you travel across the world to help build a big enterprise, tech-heavy, company that gets acquired by Microsoft for $800 million? If you're Egyptian former TellMe senior engineer Ramy Adeeb, apparently you start a new social bookmarking service. Social bookmarking or curation is a long-saturated market, but the New Delicious and several other companies are making a big go at it again. Someday, somebody is going to nail it. Probably more than one somebody.
Adeeb's new startup Snip.it is a service aimed at that market. It was quietly added to the portfolio listings of San Francisco's True Ventures tonight, a bot has found. The site is wide open with Facebook login, but no one else has yet written about its existence or about Adeeb's leaving his post as a Principal at Khosla Ventures to start it. At a time when related curation service Pinterest is one of the hottest things in Silicon Valley, I think Adeeb's Snip.it warrants some attention as well. Below, the screenshots of the app's current state.
With a Web full of stuff, discovery is a hard problem. Search engines were the first tools on the scene, but their rankings still have a hard time identifying relevance the same way a human user would. These days, social networks are the substitute for content discovery, and even the major search engines are using your social signals to determine what's relevant for you. But the obvious problem with social search is that if your friends haven't discovered it yet, it's not on your radar.
At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.
ReadWriteWeb's Friday afternoon news team confirms that the Google Plus app for iPhone has been updated to incorporate this week's new mobile features. The messaging service formerly known as Huddle has been renamed Messenger, and iPhone users now have the ability to join video Hangouts in progress.
The update also adds some basic functionality, including the ability to +1 comments within threads and post directly to individuals instead of whole circles. It also provides more granular control over push notifications. Google's social network left its "field test" phase and opened to the public this week. More from the news team, including images of Marshall Kirkpatrick blogging in the nude, after the jump.
