Last week, we interviewed Bobby Ghoshal and Matthew Ausonio, founders of FLUD. We spoke about how the startup came to be, its achievements, and their future goals. However, we only grazed the subject of their v2.0. Why? Because it was a secret and we were sworn to secrecy. We’re men of our word; however, now that the update is making its way around the iOS devices, we can finally share the details with you. By the way, there’s a new icon.
Social, meet news
FLUD is the first app to ever create a social personality for the reader. Why? Because, as Bobby says, “it can get lonely.”
Much like how people love to share their music playlists, or their photos on Facebook, or their favorite YouTube videos because their taste says something about them… the same can be said about what you read. Everyone wants to be the first to read something and influence what their friends read as well. It’s fun and it gives you credibility.
The app, which wasn’t much different from the other news reader applications, has redefined itself. It now has something that separates it from the crowd. “We’re the first service in the world to give everyone who enjoys the FLUD news ecosystem a news personality,” says Ghoshal. So what does this “personality” thing mean? Bobby explains:
“When you look at media in general, it’s full of content. You’ve got music, movies, photos, and you’ve got news. When I think about all the networks I use every single day for all four, it’s amazing. For music, I’ve got iTunes, I’ve got Spotify, and I’ve got Pandora. All of them can tell me something about myself. If you were to look at my iTunes playlist, you’d get overview about me and what my taste in music is. When you think about movies, if you looked at my Netflix account, or the videos I looked at on YouTube, you’d get a really good idea on the types of videos I like. When I think of photos, if you looked at my Facebook page or my Instagram, you could see all the photos from the last month that would give you a feel on what my life is like, etc.”
Then, Matt and I discussed news. We were like, if we’re going to make FLUD 2.0, we need to address the forth area that’s completely ignored. Like, what is the news network? It’s not just a network of people sharing news. Rather, the network has to tell you something about yourself. Much like your iTunes music library says something about you, your news personality should say the same because it’s inherently social and it says a whole lot about you.
From there, Bobby went on to give an example to explain what FLUD 2.0 will do.
So lets say you and I never met before, I saw your FLUD page, saw that you were into technology, and looked at the last five articles you wrote or read, that’s a great starting point for a conversation. I feel that there are millions of people across the world that feel the exact same way. We have freshmen in college who love Tumblr because they can all follow each other’s Tumblr blogs. When they do that, they’re creating their self-expression. I feel that FLUD brings that to the table with your news. We take a full scale of what you read and we give you this profile. It shows you your top three sources that you follow,it shows you everything that’s in your fluded list, and now you can see things that are in your reading list.
There’s much more that FLUD is bringing and hopes to bring in the future, but we’ll let you find them out. So, go download. It’s free!
Now that’s a pretty app
Yes it is. Take a look for yourself and check out the video.
