XYDO: A New Way to Get Your News

I use Google Reader constantly. If you read a large amount of websites on a daily basis, an RSS reader is a must. Right now I have over 3,000 unread articles in Reader. It gets pretty hard to keep up with all of the sites I read if you don’t have a centralized place to keep track of them all. It’s a horrible system, since a lot of articles get lost in the shuffle. Consider this: those 3,000 unread articles in my feed are just from the past two weeks. On average, there are about 250 articles added to my list every day. Since I enjoy sunlight, there is no way I can keep up with that many articles.

But how do you pick out the ones that are important enough to read? Well, Twitter helps a little bit with that. If enough people recommend an article on Twitter, I’ll give it a read but that requires me to scroll through Twitter and see what people are recommending. It’s a really inefficient way of doing things. What I really want is a product that merges all of this.

Thankfully, someone finally made that product: XYDO.

It merges Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds and subjects into a single stream that allows you to browse the latest stories. It’s currently in beta but I’ve been using it for the past week and absolutely love it. When you sign up, it asks you to access your Twitter data and automatically starts following everybody on Twitter. Whenever someone you follow shares an article, it will show up on your “Activity Stream.” You can also link it to your Facebook account (but that was a little too overwhelming for me- it almost tripled the number of articles in my stream).

That feature would alone would be useful enough but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. YXDO also allows you to also follow individual websites or people. If they aren’t already in their database, you can manually add it. Just as an example, if you wanted to follow Marco Arment, you just search for him and start following him. After that all of his articles and those he recommends will appear in your stream. What’s nice about this feature is that it doesn’t matter if they are using XYDO themselves, as it will pull data from their Twitter feed and their personal website.

But the best feature of XYDO is that you can follow specific categories. If I follow the fashion design category, I will get articles related to fashion design. It picks articles from websites that the people who follow the fashion topic have recommended as good sources of fashion news. It’s all automated pretty well and works easily.

Once you start following the people and the subjects you want, you essentially get your own personalized news stream. Once you click on an article, it opens up right in XYDO and gives you the content of the article, without any ads or even taking you to the original site (but it gives you the option of reading the article on the original site if you so choose).

The interface is slick and easy to figure out. I’ve been using it for a week and had no problems figuring things out. The only criticism I have of the site is that there is no mobile optimized version of the site.

Overall, it’s a slick and powerful new way to manage the news that you read and an even better way to find new articles.