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"Newsle brings you news on the people you care about by providing a newsfeed full of information pertaining to only your friends and the people you follow.\r\n\r\nThe service enables users to import their friends from both Facebook and LinkedIn,  and it will keep you updated when something is overheard about them on the web. But, it\u2019s not just for keeping tabs on people you know, Newsle will also let you follow the public figures you like within its large database. This includes people that are celebrities, politicians, CEOs and journalists. And when something is written about the people you've added,\u00A0 it will appear within your newsfeed.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s similar to creating a Google Alert, a service that will send you email notifications when a blog or a news site mentions the alert you created. However, Newsle allows you to see all of the \u201Calerts\u201D in one place within a very sexy user- interface.\r\n\r\nWithin the newsfeeds, the people you follow can be filtered to display everyone, only friends or just public figures, and it additionally lets users tweet, comment and vote up the posts found in the feed.\r\n\r\n\r\nA Chat with the Founders\r\nEarlier today we spoke with the founders of Newsle, Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon, both sophomores at Harvard studying computer science. They told us their site, which just launched in private beta mid-January, is a mixture of Facebook and Google Alerts. The team said they\u2019ve been working on Newsle since the summer but did the majority of work this last semester from their dorm room at Harvard.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nWe asked them to explain to us what Newsle does:\r\nIt\u2019s where to find news about your friends. You can set it up with Facebook or LinkedIn and we will import all of your contacts and then we find news mentions of them in newspapers or blogs. And you can also follow your favourite public figures so you get this newsfeed of all the people you care about.\r\nWhere is the news aggregated from, and is the information in real-time ?\r\nWe use a large number of RSS feeds from different news sites. News sites and blogs primarily, but it looks through the whole web. It\u2019s not exactly real-time especially since we\u2019re tracking over 1 million people but it\u2019s pretty close... We certainly hope to find new articles the day of.\u00A0  And for public figures it\u2019s much closer to real-time.\r\nThe team explained that \u201Carticles won\u2019t come up the instant they are published because we can\u2019t index the entire web instantaneously\u201D.\r\n\r\nHow did you come up with the idea?\r\nWe wanted to figure out what are friends were doing and we couldn\u2019t find it on Facebook, because Facebook is full of social noise and kind of unimportant news about your friends. So we wanted to find important news about your friends. It\u2019s the core idea.\r\nSince I\u2019m a blogger, if someone searched me within Newsle, would they find articles that I\u2019ve written or only posts written about me?\r\nIdeally we want to find both actually. We say it\u2019s \u201Cnews about you\u201D not \u201Cby you\u201D but what we mean is, it\u2019s real content about you, not status updates or tweets. It\u2019s longer form stuff so yes, we\u2019ll likely find articles you write and link it to you.\r\nHow does someone become a public figure on Newsle? Do you input them ?\r\nWe have a database of public figures but we can obviously add them. Essentially it\u2019s if you have a large enough internet presence. It\u2019s not from Wikipedia but  if you\u2019re on Wikipedia you\u2019ll probably be in our system... The tech crowd is a bit over represented in our database but we have a lot of politicians and celebrities and we definitely want to expand that even more.\r\nDo you have a mobile app or do you have a mobile strategy  ?\r\nNo, but the site is mobile compatible so if you visit the site on an iPhone or iPad it should function the same way it would in a browser. We may add a mobile app in the future... Certainly at some point we\u2019ll be making one, it\u2019s just a question of whether we do it this month or at the end of the summer.\r\nWhat other sites are doing what your doing?\r\nI don\u2019t think there are any, and I think that\u2019s is our real advantage. We\u2019re sort of filling in a gap, where there\u2019s is nothing that really exists. We\u2019re kind of a cross between Facebook and Google Alerts, and we take the best of both of those services... No one is going to create 600 Google Alerts for their friends, and if they did, there inbox would be flooded with all sorts of unfiltered stuff... The only other company that tried to do anything similar was this company called Angstro. It was just for LinkedIn but they did something similar where they tried to find news about your network. It never really took off, and they never really got their interface quite right. They were acquired by Google over the summer... the product got discontinued though, Google just got it just for the engineers.\r\nIs there anything else you\u2019d like to tell us about Newsle?\r\nWell.. we\u2019re tracking the news for about a million people. That\u2019s kind of impressive I guess.\r\nCan you share with us your user-base, or how many sign-ups you have so far?\r\nWe\u2019re still in private beta so you need a beta key which prevents a lot of organic growth but we\u2019re at a little over 3000 users right now.\r\nHansen and Varon also shared with us that they\u2019re working on rolling out a few new features.\r\nWe\u2019re about to roll out a feature that will make sure we\u2019re indexing the blogs of the people you follow, so for your own blog we\u2019ll be checking that more often... We have a few plans to improve the commenting functionality to make it more of an interactive full featured experience.\r\nBeta Invites!\r\nAlthough the site is still in private beta, Newsle created an unlimited amount of beta invites just for our readers. For access, visit Newsle and use the beta key &amp;quot;thenextweb&amp;quot;.\r\n\r\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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