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Washington Post launches Trove, a social-media news aggregation site

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Washington Post Co. is venturing into the social-media business with Trove, a news aggregation website that can also be accessed via mobile apps.

Trove, which went live on Wednesday, pulls news from 10,000 sources across the Internet and sorts content by what a user’s interests are.

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Users can personalize content on the site and in apps by adding or subtracting ‘channels’ that filter news on specific topics such as Google, Osama Bin Laden, books and sports.

It also sorts news by connecting to Facebook, taking information from a user’s Facebook profile page and determining through its own algorithms what a person would be interested in.

Trove editors also select breaking news stories to feature on Trove’s home page. On launch day, Ford Motor Co. was a major advertiser on the site, offering suggested news channels users can follow.

‘Because Trove is all about the individual user, the experience is customized and different for everyone,’ said Vijay Ravindran, Washington Post’s chief digital officer, in a statement. ‘We believe launching Trove is a good step toward understanding what the future of news could look like. And we’re pleased to have Ford on board to support our development of personalized news and our experimentation with new approaches toward online advertising.’

Washington Post said that more social media features will be added to Trove in coming months, as well as increased integration with Facebook.

Trove is open to the public, online or in the form of mobile apps for BlackBerry smartphones as well as smartphones and tablets running Google Android. Trove apps for Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch are in development.

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The new news product was built by the company’s WaPo Labs, which is made up of Washington Post employees and former employees of ICurrent, an online news aggregation firm that Washington Post bought last July.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

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