Viadeo, the Paris-based professional social network, has just launched a personalised news aggregation service for its 35 million registered users. The new service will deliver relevant stories from major news sites, blogs and internal sources (Update – January 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this name and we therefore deactivated the link).
The new service ‘Smart News’ is similar to ‘LinkedIn Today’, which started earlier this year. News items will be filtered according to keywords specific to each Viadeo member. The news can then be classified by date or importance, and users are able to comment and indicate whether a story was interesting. Smart News will also enable users to share videos and slide share documents on any article, by providing a preview directly on Smart News.
Peter Crosby, the CSO of Viadeo, commented: “Members can quickly get an up-to-date picture of what is going in their areas of interest. It is also a great way to find new contacts that are interested in and working in similar areas to you, as any relevant stories they post will be fed into your news reel.”
Smart News is based on an intelligent keywords algorithm that initially suggests keywords to a user based on their site activity and profile information. Members can also customise (add, remove, and prioritise) their own keywords, interests and categories of information. Smart News is already available on Viadeo and Apna Circle in five languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese).
Viadeo was founded in 2004 and has offices in Paris, London, San Francisco, Beijing, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Dakar, New Delhi and Mexico City. The professional social networking platform has about 260 employees currently.
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