Instant messaging app Hike is now aggregating news stories, something that other players in the messaging field haven’t yet looked at. Hike claims that the News feature has gathered over a million users within 24 hours of its launch. Updated yesterday for Android, the company states that the iOS app will be updated next week. Users need to enable the News option when they sign up or through settings for existing users. Its unclear whether Hike has tied up with news aggregators or if it’s curating this news through an internal team. I see news from news sites like Hindustan Times, Economic Times, The Financial Express among others, which, the company says has been compressed to 100 characters. News in 100 characters Under the news are 3 tabs: Category, Full story and a forward button. Clicking on full story opens the news website’s story within the Hike app (similar to what Facebook and Twitter does. However, in the Facebook iOS app, users cannot select to load the news article in an external browser, unlike the Facebook Android app). Clicking on category pops up a menu which displays tags like top stories, India, world, sports, technology, business, lifestyle etc. On selecting the category, users are shown news from that topic’s tag. Users can keep on reading and up-swiping the read stories. Optimised for low bandwidth and poor networks Hike also claims to be delivering 20 billion messages per month, which has apparently doubled from 10 billion messages in August last year.…
