Both aggregating content and enabling social discovery is Qulart, a Malmö-based startup that at a first glance comes somewhat as a stylish, pre-loaded RSS reader with a lot more features to tailor content to your interests. Qulart is designed to be accessible to users the first time they log in, and is useful in different ways. If you don’t have a lot of time Qulart gives you an efficient way to share and discover content most important to you. And if you want to spend more time on it, Qulart lets you add in your own RSS feeds, make your own lists, and share your favorite finds.
The application looks well designed, and on a laptop I’m a big fan of the horizontal scrolling you use to run through the lists of content. The pre-loaded lists include topics like News, business, sports, humor & awesome, music, lifestyle, and architecture. Qulart says they’re not trying to build another social network, but for more content you can also dig through what your friends have liked, which helps tailor more content towards you.
The idea behind Qulart makes sense for a lot of users. Many people have the couple blogs they like to follow, but there’s a lot of good sources of content out there everyone can’t be familiar with. RSS readers are also pretty boring, and Qulart separates itself by providing content rather than just gathering the content you choose.
“We want to be an application for the content part of the web, says Johan Unger or Quart. “That means a complete product where users can experience personalized stream of the best information that can easily be discussed and shared with the rest of the world.”
When you view the post’s article or pictures, you can give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, which helps Qulart tailor each stream of content to your interests. All the content you like is also found on your profile and shared with your followers.
The service is still in beta, but we’ll have to follow it to see if it can compete in the crowded news aggregation and social discovery space.
