BriefMe Review
Price: FREE
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Device Reviewed On: iPhone 5
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I love news. Pretty much all news, unusually. I love reading about politics, politics in other countries to mine (hey, USA!), I love the technology stuff, and I love entertainment gossip. I could probably spend a full day learning about what's going on but who really has that kind of time? Fortunately, BriefMe is an app that should make learning what's important a bit quicker and simpler.
Using a fancy news ranking system, BriefMe figures out what's being talked about most, as well as what's most popular to share. It puts all that information together to provide a score, then gives you a list of what's most popular. While that doesn't automatically relate to what's actually most important, it does correlate nicely with what your friends are mostly discussing right now.
It means that BriefMe is an excellent starting point to being briefed on the day and can come up with some interesting stories. Each story comes from a trusted source, such as the New York Times, CNN, or Mashable, meaning they are always going to be major headlines.
You can opt to view things by sections, cutting things down according to your specific tastes, plus there's a stream section that just spits out all the latest big news, no matter what time of day it is.
The best part? BriefMe doesn't really require any form of set up. You can just dive straight in. It's not perfect, such as its inexplicable lack of sharing to Safari option, but it's still pretty great. I can see this easily being the kind of app that will stick around on my iPhone, making it easy for me to catch up on what's going on around the world.