Blog - My News

Added on Thursday, 2013-07-25 17:41 CEST in categories Moscow, Programming
When I started working at Yandex I become responsible for the development of a whole new project within Yandex.News, about which I couldn't tell too much. We developed, developed, developed some more, and yesterday launched My News! (Unfortunately it's only available in Russian and Turkish.)

My News is Yandex' first step to personalization of Yandex.News: it shows you news from the news agencies you like best, but more importantly, from your friends, using the news links they post on Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte or LiveJournal. This way you can stay up-to-date on what news your friends find interesting, and have them presented to you in a clustered and annotated environment.

Clusterization means you won't see the same link from different people over and over again, and you won't even see the same news story over and over again. News links about the same story are shown as one item. Annotation means you get to see not only the news links themselves, but also their titles, a short snippet, the story they belong to, and possibly one or more relevant pictures.

My News also has its influence on Yandex.News itself: within news stories, links from your favorite news agencies and from your friends will be shown higher up, and marked as such. The most important My News is always shown on Yandex.News front page.

Like said, My News is only Yandex.News' first step towards personalization, there're possibilities aplenty. But most importantly, the first step is there. Hoorah! :D