Many people nowadays have a part-time job, without even knowing it – the job entails keeping up on the news items that your friends share on Twitter or Facebook.
News.me is an iPhone/iPad app that combs through your social network feeds and filters out the most important news stories shared by the contacts you follow.
The idea is that you’re more likely to care about what your friends and family are sharing, rather than the frenzy of news coming from every direction.
Once you link up your News.me account to Twitter or Facebook, it automatically combs through your feeds for news stories, whether or not your friends are also on News.me. Once it’s done, your main feed shows you a list of stories along with who shared it and where, and whatever comments they made along with the story.
When you tap on a story, the app brings up the text of that article along with any associated photos and gives you the opportunity to react to it. There’s a list of predefined reactions, or you can type your own.
From the main screen, you can tap the icon on the upper left to see three options (News, Reactions, and Reading List), and when you tap on Reactions, you can see any comments that your other friends on News.me have made on various stories.
The News.me iPhone app also offers a Reading List feature, which allows you to mark stories from your News.me feed to read offline.
While the News.me iPhone app is new, the company already has an iPad app available on the App Store as well. This is unfortunately not the case for Android phone and tablet users.
I like the app overall. Its functionality is simple, but in a good way – it offers you exactly what it says it will in a fairly easy-to-use manner.
A technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.