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The parent companies of The New York Times and The Washington Post are both launching news aggregation services this week. The Washington Post Co.'s Trove.com, a hybrid human-automatic aggregator, launched today and tomorrow The New York Times Co., in collaboration with Betaworks, will unveil News.me, a social news aggregator. It's 2011 so everyone realizes it's pretty late in the game to do this, but from what's on the table it's clear both companies made significant investments into each product. Here's what they have to offer:
Trove
The first nice thing about Trove is that it's free. All you have to do is visit Trove.com and log in via Facebook Connect. The personalized news site harvests your Facebook interests and spits out a number of news stories it hopes you like.
The left column features human-curated content from news breaking around the web. The Channel Finder on the right asks you to select niche areas of interest like "organic gardening" or "Lady Gaga," and provides stories nested under those channels below. The service also has a social element letting you share channels with your friends and engage in conversations on each channel. The service is also available as an app on Android and Blackberry with iPhone and iPad apps coming later. In a strange (gutsy?) move, the Post recruited the Taiwanese animators NME to promote the service: