If you’re into social networking–as in, actual networking for work or personal reasons–then you definitely want to know about newsle, a wonderful newsfeed service that is keeping me on top of all the important stuff they’re doing.
Subscribe to newsle and connect it to your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts (Gmail addresses too, though I skipped that part). You’ll get a daily email digest that rounds up which people in your network are in the news–like the screenshot above of Carolyn Everson of Facebook. Then you can click through for the full article.
You can even see where you’ve been mentioned–just go onto the site and search your own name. Here’s my friend C.C. Chapman, for example.
What you’re seeing is a dedicated page (newsle.com/yourname) that includes any articles about you, your Twitter feed and Twitter favorites, and widgets that show, among other things, your “most famous friends” which always cracks me up. There’s also a customizable newsle widget that you can post on your own site with articles about you if that’s your thing.
It’s even picked up a few mentions that even my Google alerts haven’t, which is impressive.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a major media mogul; think of newsle a great way to find out that your uncle just won an award, an old friend published a book; or a prospective employer got some press that gives you an excuse to say congratulations. There are even buttons right under each news story abstract so you can share on Facebook, tweet, or email it.
You can also use Newsle to search for articles on people of interest who you don’t know personally (unless you know Bill Gates) in any number of categories which could be helpful. Or just a good time suck instead of Candy Crush Saga.
Now one of the challenges with the service is that if you have a friend with a common name (or who shares a name with a celeb), you sometimes get alerts that aren’t about the person you know. As in no, your high school French teacher is not performing at the Hollywood Bowl next week. However you can flag it as the wrong person, and newsle starts to “learn” to be more accurate.
Another thing I’m meh on is a “newsle rank” of each person from 1 to 100, which aims to be an alternative to Klout.
(Ask my friends and social media followers how I feel about Klout and social media ranking systems.)
I’ve shared newsle with quite a few friends and everyone seems to love the email in particular. It’s definitely geared more towards networking professionals, but if you have a wide network and find it hard to keep up with the big stuff, it’s kind of nice to find out that Lori is judging an awards show or Amy wrote a new piece on Forbes.
And then write to them and say “go you!” Which is indeed, a very social thing to do. –Liz
