New personalised news stream service 'Wavii' to challenge Facebook's 'news feed'

Washington, Apr 12 (ANI): Engineers who had previously worked for respected tech firms Amazon and Microsoft, have now created a new personalised news stream service that would challenge social networking giant Facebook's 'news feed' feature.

The new service named Wavii, which is offered via the web or as a smartphone app, searches the net, including tweets, news stories and blogs, to offer a customised feed.

According to The BBC, the new service is likely to compete with Facebook's news feed, prompting speculation that it could become a takeover target.

While Facebook's feed is mainly based on status updates and content shared by users, Wavii highlights what's happening in the world at large by creating personalised news streams based on data taken from across the web.

Adrian Aoun, Wavii's founder and chief executive, said that his service offers a more complete experience.

"Facebook is aggregating all this structured data about your friends, and we are aggregating all this structured data about the world - the other half that Facebook doesn't have," the report quoted him, as saying.

"We are looking at everything and mapping it into story types. We try to look for patterns," he added.

According to the report, Wavii detects users' likes and interests based on their previous Facebook activity and by asking them to select at least 12 topics or people of interest.

These range from celebrities and politicians to business acquisitions and gadgets. (ANI)