Twitter based social newspaper goes mobile; Website nearing a million monthly unique visits
Frrole, the social newspaper based off Twitter, has launched its iPhone & Android apps, bringing the product to the growing set of mobile news consuming audience. While the apps provide localized news editions for more than 50 cities and 6 countries just like the Frrole website does, the apps additionally allow the user to personalize news discovery around preferred locations, categories and even news sources. User could select headlines and events for Bangalore; headlines, technology and business news for India and only travel and sports news for the world for example. (read the complete Frrole story)
Founded by Amarpreet Kalkat, Frrole is a promising product that has been climbing the ladder the hard way. Talking about traffic on the site, Kalkat says, “It has now grown well past half a million monthly unique users every month, and is moving closer to the million monthly unique users mark as we speak.” Addressing the global market, more than 50% of the users for Frrole come from the US and almost 20% from UK and Canada.
Having been in the space since November 2011, one would have expected Frrole to go the mobile way earlier considering the fact that news consumption would be high on the go. The apps were in the pipeline for quite some months but now they’re out and the look good. There’s a first with the iPhone app- It can automatically detect whenever a user changes his location and suggests if the user wants to see the local news, enabling him to be aware of his surroundings the moment he sets foot in a new city.
“Almost all the current set of social news apps provide either a 'social graph view' or an 'interest graph view' of news. Frrole is clear that while personalized, it wants to provide a 'world view' of news, because that is inherently what news has always been about,” explains Amarpreet. When you know what you want and from which source, apps like Flipboard and Pulse are the apt choice but if you’re just looking for news in the conventional sense- all that people are talking around the globe- Frrole comes to the fore.
