Where do you get your news (besides TechCrunch, of course)? Some of you may like that familiar tactile experience of newsprint, ink on the fingers, but chances are that your news consumption takes place mostly online — or on a mobile device. But thanks to the content fire hose that is the Internet, there’s a lot of irrelevant junk floating around out there, and, thus, the focus of digital readers and content distributors has turned to improving the filters, aggregators, and readers that channel the noise into signal.
Whether your go-to resources for realtime news happen to be Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, or the TechMemes of the world, we’re all looking for an easy, curated, and social, way to consume content from the sites we trust — as well as those we like but don’t visit as often.
XYDO, a startup that launched in May and raised $1.25 from EPIC Ventures and a host of angels in June, has hopped into the social news space by offering a user experience that combines the best parts of sites like Digg and Hacker News in an effort to serve you with relevant, curated, and social news from top content houses.
XYDO has met with early success (over 750,000 unique visitors in August alone) because of that very idea: It wants to be a newsfeed that effectively prioritizes the content that actually matters to you. For starters, it does this via its web platform. But what if we don’t want to click over to XYDO.com every time we want to get the latest headlines?
To expand on its news personalization mission and to try to hit users with a virtual version of a rolled up newspaper right at home, the startup is today announcing the launch of XYDO Brief, which aims to deliver personalized and relevant news based on a user’s social interactions, networks, and footprints — all via email, the place they’re likely to be at least once a day.
News via email? Well that’s nothing new, you might say. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But XYDO is hoping to offer a value proposition and an occasion to rethink this stance by combing the Web and your social networks to provide a really simple, realtime method to get news via the inbox. XYDO Brief takes advantage of the same social sourcing mixed with actual human curation technique that it is used by its flagship product.
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 curation, 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.
The default setting on XYDO Brief is one email a day, but users can go in and select different categories of blasts (be it “tech” or “politics”) that they’d like to receive, as well as how many of these briefs they’d like to receive — and at what time of day. For those who live on wire services, this seems very similar; it’s the broadly available email version.
So, for those of us who spend all day in our inboxes anyway, being able to tinker with a simple service that’s fairly customizable, in an effort to provide an easy way to read the news without having to go search our social networks and favorite content sources — is huge.
Also of note: XYDO is providing TechCrunch readers with 500 exclusive (and free) invites to check out their new product. To test the service for yourself, click here. Then come on back and let us know what you think.
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