News360

» see news360.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

news360 was one of a dozen apps from the early 2010s that promised to read the whole web for you and hand back only the parts you cared about. it reached me as a name in that pile, never as something i installed. i was already reading news the old engineer way, through feeds i picked myself, and i did not want an interest graph guessing on my behalf.

the app came out of san francisco in july 2010, built by roman karachinsky and nina grigorieva. the pitch was semantic analysis. it read each story to decide what it was really about, then matched that against a profile of your interests it assembled as you tapped around. it claimed more than four million users and raised around seven and a half million dollars over its life.

pressreader bought news360 in august 2019 and moved the team up to vancouver. the app kept running for a while as one piece of a larger digital-newsstand business, then quietly went idle. by august 2022 it had ceased operations, folded into the parent's platform without a proper goodbye. it did not so much die as get absorbed into something bigger that no longer needed the brand.

~ the dossier ~

~ the category ~

the personalized news reader was a category that kept holding funerals. zite, circa, nuzzel, prismatic, all of them ran a version of the same bet, that an algorithm could pick your news better than you could. news360 lasted longer than most, but it landed in the same place. the audience for a smart middleman between you and the news turned out to be smaller than the money going in.

~ what it left ~

the interest-graph machinery did not vanish, it just stopped being a product with a face. that kind of semantic tagging and matching lives now inside recommendation systems you never see, inside the newsstands and the big feeds that swallowed the standalone readers. news360 gave its engine to pressreader and let the app fade. the idea won and the brand lost, which is how most of these end.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »