Smart News: Right There On ApnaCircle.com

Smart Search Box On ApnaCircle.com

Ever wondered about a social media platform who provides you with news based on your usage and activity on the platform? Sure we all agree it would be so nice to log on to the site and be presented with news right there on the Home Page that is served absolutely to your needs. Yes we have heard about the LinkedIn news but for now since we are not there on the site, we will keep this post about the Smart News on ApnaCircle. LinkedIn post will follow once we have an account there!!
The smart news box that you see in the pic above is what we were presented with when we landed the first time on the page after login that the site people call their 'Dashboard'. For a moment we wondered what it is and why it didn't go even after a few days we already spent on the site. So we went discovering about it, though we agree it wasn't that difficult to figure the usage, but it took us some time to get the feel of it.

The page or the dashboard (it will take some time for us to call the mail page the dashboard) tabs came to the rescue. Very nicely placed above the fold and in a very neat fashion, it wasn't hard to find them. On the initial front we landed on the 2nd tab, the 'My Network'. This tab provides you with all the news about what your contacts share with you. 'Smart News' tab, on which we discuss mostly on this post is where you get the news based on the keywords that either you provide, or the application decides are best for you based on your usage & activity on the site.
The best thing on the 'Smart News' tab is that the customization is pretty easy. We look at the different areas in there.


Add your Keywords

Keywords add on Smart News tab

Apart from the 'My Network' tab, the keyword add form is here as well. Which to us makes more sense and we think the one on the 'My Network' tab is more of a "for a new user" kind of thing. So, here you just add the keywords separated by comma and click the button and you are done. For us it took only a fraction till we saw the news according to the keywords that we added.


Smart gets Intelligent

smart news is intelligent

Like we said, smart news is based on your keywords as well the usage and activity that you do on the site. We loved the idea of the preference where we could ask the application to monitor our activity and provide news based on it. If you want, however, you could turn it off here only. Simple!


Adjust the weightage of your keywords 

smart news keywords preference

Here you can see both type of keywords, the one that you explicitly added and the one that the application picked for you, and can adjust the importance of them as per your preference. Again, we found the usage and interface very good to use and most importantly simple.


Mute what you don't want

mute keywords on smart news

Just as we were thinking that there should be a way to tell the application what I "really" don't want to get pissed-off with. And here we were. This section just quietly took some words that we put in here(don't ask us what) and they simply filtered the smart news based on those keywords. Super cool!
With all this settings done just like that, we were impressed to see the way the smart news was presented to us. At first it was from whoever shared it and secondly it was nice to see that moving the cursor over to particular news gave us the keywords that this news was associated with. Have a look for yourself:

Smart News Post

This is for our Jelly Bean post, as you can see we have 'plate' and 'jelly bean' keywords associated with this. And again, this was when we moved the cursor on the news. It was nice to see that you could sort the posts based on either 'Date' or 'Relevance'.


Our Views
We found the feature really cool, especially since it lets us browse through the topics that we are interested in and out of our contact group. The interface is really ease-to-use and the results are accurate enough to depend.
One thing that we really missed, like Google plus, it would have been really good if we were presented news from the web based on the settings we did.
Let s know what do you think about it! 
Oh and by the way, if you happen to log on to the site, don't forget to search for us there. Here is the link to our profile on ApnaCircle! Happy Crunching then!