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XYDO Prioritizes & Organizes News Shared on Twitter & Facebook

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Social news site XYDO, launching publicly Tuesday, aims to prioritize and organize online news based on each user's social graph and interests.

"What we're trying to do with XYDO is build a social network around news," explains co-founder Cameron Brain. "We want to take what Digg and Reddit started and bring the idea into the modern generation."

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 sorts pages by vote counts. Total vote count includes onsite upvotes 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.

The site's structure allows users to browse unlimited news items without ever having to submit stories manually. Instead, XYDO automatically considers the user's social shares elsewhere on the web as news submissions, tallies the shares and then ranks and prioritizes them based on the user's specified interests.

"It's easy for people to find the best content in the world, organized by the subjects they care about," co-founder and CEO Eric Roach says.



XYDO is equal parts automation and human curation. The founders describe it as Quora meets Digg, or rather Quora meets Techmeme. "XYDO has the social structure of a Quora; but from a content perspective, it's about delivering the best human-curated content," says Roach.

Brain and Roach will need to come up with a few not-so-tech-insider comparisons should they wish to sell the idea to a crowd outside the technology industry. Early adopters may recall that in 2008, Socialmedian, a site also trafficking in social news, was a favorite of the social media elite but faded into obscurity months later.

The social graph wasn't around three years ago, the co-founders say, at least not in the way it exists today. "There's a significant difference between the amount and type of data that you could use to build a social network for news then as opposed to now," says Brain.

XYDO's unique social sharing and news matching component, which the founders believe humanize the experience, is also noteworthy. "Nothing enters XYDO unless it touches a real person," explains Brain.

XYDO's launch may also get an accidental helping hand at Digg's expense, especially since the new site could prove a powerful assistant for publishers looking to make up pageviews they once found via Digg. The co-founders report that most users are clicking through to the original source of the stories they discover.

XYDO has signed up more than 7,000 private beta users, mostly by way of friend-to-friend invitations. The audience translates to a combined social graph or "meta network" — considering each user's Facebook and Twitter connections — of more than 1.1 million contributors adding to XYDO's social network news.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kyoshino

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