Four apps to help you get news from social media

Atheer – External Sources

With Facebook’s recent pledge to cut back on News Feed traffic from brands, businesses and publishers, you may notice a growing void in your News Feed in the coming months. Wired.com presents four different applications that can help users get around this.

An application called Nuzzel, when synced to users’ Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, provides the user with a feed of the top articles and videos circulating within their social and professional networks. Nuzzle studies what users’ friends are reading on those different platforms and users also have the option to see what is popular among their friends of friends.

Those looking for news about entertainment and politics should give Zig a try. By inferring interests and social media habits from Facebook and Twitter accounts, Zig can provide users with a steady stream of trending images and videos that it knows they will like.

Flipboard’s list of featured interests covers everything from foreign policy to cooking recipes and is notable for providing both conservative and liberal views. Once the user decides on a passion, such as technology for example, they can personalise it with relevant hashtags. The user then receives a daily collection of stories about technology. Flipboard also syncs with social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, and Tumblr.

Pre-installed on every iOS device, Apple’s news-reader app keeps things pretty simple. It doesn’t ask about interests, but rather it provides users with top stories, trending stories and stories based on channels and topics that they have previously read in the Apple News app. The more the user reads, the better curated the news becomes. Users can speed up the personalisation process by selecting topics, people, or media outlets that they want to follow. Siri plays a part too; the digital assistant can suggest publications that may be of interest based on users’ Safari and app usage. Apple News saves users’ history of read articles, meaning that they can go back to where they left off inside an Apple News article at any time. It’s a simple application through which users can keep up to date with the news.