Prismatic chief Bradford Cross believes that online social networks should go beyond following people to pursuing interests.

To that end, the San Francisco-based startup on Thursday released a Prismatic app that lets users of Apple mobile gadgets tap into the latest news based on what they like rather than who they know.

"When you only get things via people, you end up getting boxed into a single point of view," Cross told AFP.

"We think it is more about lighting up the rest of the Internet that you might not be exploring."

Prismatic started several years ago as a personalized news reader but has steered its technology towards letting users build social networks based on common interests.

"You follow all kinds of stuff to your heart's content," Cross said.

"We basically have everything in the world that matters for the past week on any given topic."

Prismatic scours the Internet for information and indexes it on servers where ranking software figures out what individual users might find most interesting.

"Prismatic under the hood functions like a mix of Facebook, Twitter and Google," Cross said.

"We know what matters based on what people are talking about and what is happening online, then we use what we learn about you and your network to show you the right stuff."

Prismatic expects to release a version of the application for Android-powered mobile devices next year.