Comunitee.com launches a personalized news network

News aggregating social network personalizes articles in your feed based on what your friends read

For those of us that are serious consumers of news, it can be time-consuming to navigate to all of sites where our interests lie. 

A new company launched Monday with hopes that people would like to have one spot where their news articles can get aggregated to in real-time.

Comunitee.com's beta release allows users to sign-up for free and choose the interests that they want to read about on a daily bases. Users are also able to add friends with similar interests so that articles they read are suggested to their circle of friends -- using a software that learns your interests and reading habits to better suggest new media.

Co-founder and CEO of Comunitee, Don Daszkowski spoke with VatorNews about the new network and how it can improve the familiar RSS experience, Twitter feeds or article sharing on Facebook.

"We aren't looking to replace Twitter or Facebook as places where people go for breaking news," said Daskowski. "But those sites are dependent upon someone else curating the news and reposting it, we want news to go directly to you in real-time and people can additionaly be influenced by others with similar interests."

Comunitee allows users to create a customized feed that aggregates from thousands of the most popular newsfeeds — from CNN to Popular Photography Magazine.

Daskowski told me that some 77% of Americans now get their news online or on mobile devices and that creating a single app or network is key in getting people to the information that means the most to them without the fuss of changing tabs or screens. 

Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn where people are encouraged to add all of their friends or colleagues, Comunitee encourages its users to be exclusive with their friend circles and only connect with the people that reflect the same reading interests. 

Creating a Comunitee account is made easy since it connects with a person's Facebook profile and after choosing your favorite topics, you can start reading content in your feed.

Currently, Comunitee is only available on your Web browser but the company is interested in releasing the HTML5 mobile Web application in the coming months. 

“It seems like everyone wants to compare our service to a tablet news reader like Flipboard or Zite, but we can't stress enough, the importance of the social aspect on this service,” said Daszkowski. “We knew that only 11% of Americans owned tablets and we wanted to first cater to the other 89% that need a better way to read their news."

Recently the buzz on reader platforms has hovered around Flipboard and the newly released Google Currents but not much talk has been focused on those that still read their news on Web browsers.

The year-old New York City-based company is only working off of $170,000 of seed and angel funding as it builds up its usership. The company is also looking into the ways that it can allow users to import their current RSS feeds so that they can rely solely on Comunitee for anything they wish to read.