News360 Periscope, Related News On Popular Online News Sites

Sometimes when you read news on a site you may be interested in additional information or perspectives for a deeper understanding and better picture.

While you could use a search engine for that, you could also try the browser extension Periscope by the news aggregation service News360.

The extension works like related post links that you see on a lot of blogs and news type sites. Unlike the majority of those though that only link to other articles on the same site, the Periscope extension finds and displays related articles and news on other sites.

Periscope concentrates on mainstream online news portals and sites like BBC News, the Wallstreet Journal, the Guardian, Business Week or the Washington Post. This means that it is best suited for Internet users who regularly read news on at least one of those online news sites. If you favor independent sites, smaller newspapers or niche sites then you won't find much use in the extension as it does not provide links to related news posts in this case. The available site pool exceeds 10,000 according to the developers.

After you have installed the extension in your favorite browser, or installed an app for your phone, you will see a news bar at the top of supported news portals that links to related articles.

The toolbar displays the news magazine or site name only, and not the actual title of the related article that you will find on that site. That's an oversight as you may run into the same article or an unrelated article on another site.

You can however expand the toolbar to display additional news sources and images on the screen. It can take a few moments before the toolbar is displayed on a page. This should not be a big usability issue considering that most users will start reading the news on the original site first before they start being interested in additional coverage.

Internet users who do not want to install an extension for that, can access the database of sites on the News360 website as well.

Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari users find download links on the official website. Everyone else finds links to the mobile app versions of the application and the web based version there as well.

Update: it appears that the browser extensions are not available anymore. You only find the mobile apps listed on the website instead. While you may find the add-ons listed on official web stores as well, they have not been updated for a long time.

The Firefox version of Periscope for example was last updated more than three years ago and does not work anymore in newer versions of the browser.

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