Its all about the news

This is one of the newest tools on the block, and was launched in May 2011. It looks like the Web’s Social Network for News. In August they launched a daily, customizable news brief that goes to your inbox.

You might question if it is a Social network at all? I suggest finding out what XYDO actually is by reading the very words of Eric Roach, CEO and Co-Founder of XYDO.com, from a post made on Quora in March 2011.

XYDO also has a community leaderboard, which is a list of the most influential individuals within the community.

Here is what Techcrunch and Mashable had to say about XYDO

“Every piece of content that enters its system (from over 100,000 content sources) is scored based on the recommendations of the startup’s 2 million+ contributors and curators. Using its secret sauce of social network aggregation and prioritization mixed with crowdsourced curator, XYDO serves its users with between 10 to 12 personalized headlines in every email — that have passed these socially-tested benchmarks to ensure the news you’re receiving in your inbox is the news you want to see” - Techcrunch

“XYDO gathers news from tens of thousands of online sources; matches articles against what users are sharing and talking about on Facebook and Twitter, and then sort’s pages by vote counts. Total vote count includes onsite up votes as well as Facebook or Twitter shares. The user can view news made by popular by the entire XYDO network, see stories popular in their social graph or view trending news items by topic” - Mashable.

“Social endorsement”

The XYDO web site has a connections tab, where you can see your connections, and the followers that they have. My contact at Adobe is listed as one of mine, Jeff Jordan. There are many other popular Social media personalities that use XYDO. You also see that each has a recommended number which can be a minus number. You also see their latest news activity. You also see a green number showing the popularity of the posts, with shares on social sites pushing numbers ever higher, which they call “social endorsement”.

If you click through on the news articles, they open in your browser with a XYDO toolbar. There you see the green number again. You can click “I like this” which makes that number increase. You can also vote it down. You can also leave comments and share out the article via the toolbar. The toolbar has a Stumbleupon feel to it when you click the “XY see next” button as it then goes and fetches a new news item to display from the community that you are in, which you can change in the toolbar. Clicking through the news links in your email update will not open the toolbar.

The XYDO Brief

I have been using XYDO for a few months now. The daily news is called the “XYDO Brief”. If you do not like the daily default frequency of news delivery, you can adjust it.

Digg and Reddit

I have used Digg and Reddit for a couple of years now, and XYDO is a breath of fresh air. If you are in your inbox at least once a day, like most of us would admit, then you might find XYDO useful.

In summary

I do miss the lack of help and guidance on the site itself, forcing me to Google to get extra insight to some of XYDO’s functionalities. However, when it comes to news delivery, it has promise and is very useful.

For further reading, I suggest a blog post from Socialistic.com, an interview with the XYDO founders.