Has anyone in your group of family or friends done anything that made the news lately? How about your favorite celebrity? Now you can find out right away with Newsle.
Currently in public beta, Newsle connects with your Facebook page or your LinkedIn profile and searches for published articles about your friends or colleagues. Once found, these articles are compiled for you in a newsfeed on Newsle’s site, complete with pictures where available. You can also track news stories where your own name is referenced. The more you’re mentioned, the higher your Fame Factor rises on the site. If you’re more interested in specific celebrity news on the other hand, Newsle also lets you follow popular public figures, including actors, actresses, politicians, and authors.
Newsle is surprisingly accurate with the data it pulls on each of your search queries, particularly when it comes to people with common names. The site uses a combination of information pulled from publicly available sources about your friends, as well as a natural language selection formula to narrow down its choices. It’s not fool-proof by any means (last time I checked my brother has never played competitive college tennis, for example), but overall, Newsle’s pretty accurate.
There are also talks about developing Newsle for mobile phones in the future, should the public launch of the main site prove to be popular among internet users. To use Newsle you’ll need to either grant the site access to your Facebook profile or your LinkedIn account, which you can do directly on Newsle’s frong page.
