Tracking your friends and idols
It’s like Facebook, but without all the social stuff, Jonah Varon explained. Varon and Axel Hansen, two Harvard sophomores, have created a new website that seeks to out-Google Google when it comes to tracking news about your friends. “Facebook is so full of social noise that you don’t get the important stuff,” Varon said. “There’s less content here than if you went to [someone’s] Facebook page, but it’s more meaningful.” Varon and Hansen met during their freshman year. Though Hansen had some computer skills when he arrived, Varon says his are entirely the result of Harvard computer science courses, including CS 50, the introductory course that has been credited with adding computers to more than one student’s study plans. The two pooled their talents and, over the past six months, developed Newsle (pronounced “news-el”), a site that crawls the web for you to find news and blog posts about your friends, celebrities, and even...