The words “trust” and “intimacy” don’t normally spring to mind when talking about a news app, but it’s hard to talk about News360 without bringing them up right away. That’s because in order for this app to function to complete effect, the user needs to do some fairly serious opening up him or herself — not quite the therapist’s couch or the lover’s embrace, but still enough to give one pause.
At its heart, News360 is a news aggregator that can be customized around the user’s tastes and past media consumption patterns. The sticky side is that in order to ascertain these tastes and patterns, the user needs to give News360 access to his or her major social media accounts — Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, specifically — along with Google Reader and Evernote. That done, its software crawls through that long history of retweets, likes and visited articles and starts to assemble a feed that’s more in line with the user’s tastes.