Posts Tagged ‘launch’

Today, Kosmix is introducing a cool new site: MeeHive.

MeeHive is a personalized newspaper that brings you the latest about what’s happening in your world. You list the topics and issues you’re passionate about, and MeeHive will scour thousands of news outlets and millions of blogs to find stories about your interests. You can share articles with others, see what friends read, and even use your iPhone to get MeeHive on-the-go. It’s your news, your way.

So why did we build MeeHive? MeeHive grew out of an observation that it was difficult for people to get news about their interests in a single place. How was I going to get daily news about Project Runway, global warming, and UCLA basketball? I could search on the Internet everyday for news about these topics, but that is clearly not scalable past 5 interests. I could set up an RSS reader, but I might have to wade through 100 articles from 10 blogs just to read 2 articles about the latest green device, amongst many other issues. I could set up individual news alerts for each interest, but the stories are not aggregated together. What we discovered was that each person needs a “personal news editor”. This personal editor knows about all the news related to your interests, and selects the most interesting news articles for you to read. Just take a look at my hive to see what stories my editor has picked for my 60+ interests at this point of time.

Everyone’s MeeHive newspaper is unique. My colleague Sesh is vastly different from me. Sesh is our CTO at Kosmix, and he’s very passionate about technology, venture capital, Indian cricket, and carnatic music. He also has over 30 other interests. Take a look at his hive as well.

As we were building MeeHive, we felt that in addition to the personal editor, we also wanted our friends to bring to our attention interesting articles — thus acting as additional editors for me. Sesh is always recommending articles with his (tongue in cheek) comments and more often than not I have found myself caring more about an article when a friend has recommended it to me. For example, I found Sesh’s recommendation about the book industry interesting even though I don’t have a strong interest in Amazon. These article recommendations add an element of serendipity to my newspaper. Finally, we felt that the ability for people to look at others newspapers and draw inspiration for topics of interests they should be adding is very useful. I recently added my interest in Green Tea after seeing it in someone else’s hive.

So what other features will you find on MeeHive?
• Read more than just news. We also have editorials, blog posts, press releases, videos, tweets, and more!
• Receive your personalized top stories in a daily email or as an occasional tweet
• Add RSS feeds, for those publishers you like to follow

MeeHive has been in private beta for the past six months. We want to thank all our friends, family, and supporters for using the site and giving us very valuable feedback. We’re excited to open MeeHive up to everyone today. Check it out and let us know what you think!