Students Create 'Newsle'

The latest social networking initiative to emerge from the minds of Harvard undergraduates—a site called Newsle—seeks to provide users with streaming updates on friends, co-workers, and public figures.

Newsle—a portmanteau of “news” and “people”—allows users to import contacts from social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. It then tracks relevant online stories about those individuals published in news sites and blogs in a user-friendly newsfeed format.

The site is the brainchild of Axel R. Hansen ’13 and Jonah L. Varon ’13, computer science concentrators in Quincy House who met as roommates freshman year. The pair said they launched the site in hopes of personalizing the way they follow their friends’ activities.

While sites like Twitter and Facebook also allow users to track the activity of individuals in the user’s social circle, they often generate too much “noise”—or unwanted information—in their live feeds, the organizers said.

“Newsle is unique in the Internet world, [where] Facebook is one side of the coin and Google News is the other,” added Hansen. “There really isn’t anything that does this.”

The website, currently available in a beta version, has so far tracked over one million news stories, including stories from both small and major outlets.

The Newsle interface provides a stream of information—much like the main page of Twitter or Facebook—about the user’s contacts and allows the user to filter for content about one’s friends and other information about public figures.

“It’s almost laid out like a planner—cool and intuitive,” said Eli A. Kozminsky ’14, one of 2,000 beta testers for the site. “You don’t lose that tactile sensation, like flipping through a magazine,” he said.

“It’s really awesome that two young undergraduates put together this awesome-looking website, but also useful,” he added.

The site’s organizers said they plan to publicly launch Newsle in two weeks, which they say will allow them to gain a clearer picture of the project’s future.

According to Hansen and Varon, the most challenging step in the site’s development lay in writing the algorithms that discriminate between people with identical names and those that sort the relative importance of news articles.

“Our ultimate goal is to change the way people consume news,” Varon said. “If you follow a topic in two weeks, the topic won’t be the news anymore, but if you’re following a person who’s behind it, you’ll be able to keep following all sorts of interesting stories.”

—Staff writer Amy Guan can be reached at guan@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Radhika Jain can be reached at radhikajain@college.harvard.