In the last year, we’ve covered well over a dozen activity aggregators, nearly all of which share a single goal: helping you keep track of your friends’ exploits across the web.
Today, we see the launch of Fwix, an aggregator that is taking a (thankfully) different approach. Fwix isn’t concerned with your friends – instead, it keeps track of what’s going on in your physical region. The site pulls data from over 30 APIs including Yelp, Twitter, and Eventful, with more on the way. Every 15 minutes it combs through thousands of potential stories, using a series of algorithms to determine what the hottest items are in your city – it’s sort of like a regional News Feed.
But Fwix doesn’t just bear a resemblance to Facebook’s News Feed in function – a quick tour around the site reveals that it’s nearly visually identical as well. This isn’t a coincidence: Darian Shirazi, one of the site’s co-founders, was an early Facebook employee who was involved with the News Feed project.
The site is laid out well and is very intuitive. Users can browse through stories by their category (News, media, etc.), and can also choose to look at a regional or universal stream. And because there’s no login, the site could easily serve as a Digg alternative for users looking for a constant stream of new content to read (though I quickly began to wish it refreshed more often than once every 15 minutes).
Fwix has potential, but it still lacks a number of key features. For one, there’s really no way to figure out why a given story is being displayed in the feed. This morning I was presented with a series of photos of a Renaissance fair, with no indication as to why this stream was considered popular. To remedy this, Fwix needs to include a descriptive measure of each item’s popularity (something along the lines of “there have been 3 blog posts and 5 tweets about this photo”). There’s also currently no way to select which APIs you’d like to draw data from, though the team says this is on the way.
Fwix will see competition from a number of other activity streams (FriendFeed) and news aggregators (SocialMedian and Regator), but most of these do not consider location in their algorithms.
I had to say it first: Wow, somebody was inspired by Facebook!
I love the idea, but looking at the current Chicago feed, I can’t imagine any given person finding more than 1 out of 10 of the stories interesting.
it looks like crap
this is so sweet, i’m actually seeing things i like compared to digg.
I wonder how Facebook feels about a former employee mimicking their design?
Great idea! I just found a good deal for outsideland tickets
I love it – this is like the CNN caption on steroids.
the travel deals are pretty awesome plus i never liked kyte.tv but seeing them run around in my area is cool
Awesome, but I would have liked to know before I signed up that the cities were so limited. That’s what I get for not living in the Valley, I guess.
No Phoenix yet? fail. But service looks really cool. I already aggregate a bunch locally for me in google reader but this is pretty neat.
I like the concept. It would be interesting to see how they evolve their feeds to make it more relevant beyond a few occasional flashes.
just looking like facebook drives me away from it
Thanks for the comments guys! We’re three dudes (2 coders) in a small house near Palo Alto so we’re doing as much as we can to make the service better. Please give us feedback so we can implement new features quickly.
How to search for a specific city like ‘Hamburg, Germany’?
I think you guys are onto something. Keep up the good work. Please add Atlanta.
Oh wow, I figured this was a Facebook app.
I think that’s what they are hoping for.
Add Toronto and maybe i’ll give it a shot
looks like they are competing against Outside.in and its Radar application.
(linkback) Thrive or Fail? Fwix – A localized feed of stuff going on in your neighborhood [VOTE] – http://www.thri...rfail.com/6e725
I vote that thriveorfail.com will fail… because that is one butt ugly website.
enough with the logo cb links!
Looks like the location based services space is heating up. I’m not sure if data aggregation will be the solution, seems lo lack structurce but who knows.
Jippidy.com – Video Yellow Pages
I liked the site and the idea, but I do think the TechCrunch article should have mentioned that there are only about 5 cities available at present. I’m sure if the site is successful (which it should be!) that they’ll expand…till then, great idea guys!
was interested in this concept but the results are not so interesting. nice start though!
Getting large enough geographic coverage to be widely useful for localized relevance is tough. Craigslist has been the best at this followed by yelp, and topix.
Youtube and Hulu integration seems very poor and worthless at the moment.
SO many ways iterate on an idea.
Cool idea, but should not look 100% like Facebook. At least change the colors a bit or something, otherwise everyone will assume that this is a Facebook app, like I did at first glance.
Fwix looks really interesting. Thanks for the mention, Jason. Regator has a local interest channel that has local quality blog content for many major US and International cities and regions. Many still need to be fleshed out, but we have over 50 blogs just for Atlanta alone as an example. We’re also doing some other geotagging behind the scenes for some future features! This is going to be a big growth area for us! Oh yeah, we’re really not a news aggregator, in fact we don’t have any typical newsfeeds (AP, Reuters, CNN, etc) on our site. It’s one of the big things that makes us a fair bit different than the others, as we only have premium, hand-picked blog content.
Cheers,
Scott.
Co-founder Regator
it would only be useful as a resource for OTHER sites, like local content feeds, but they appear to prohibit this function…
http://www.everyblock.com/ should have been mentioned for prosperity. It offers a similar set of information.
All these aggregators remind me of the companies offering tools for “Social Media Monitoring” or “Social Media Management”.
Only it is based on “local” rather than “brand”, which should be easier
First of all, it looks like a half-loaded Facebook page. Next, the Favicon is a direct rip off of Microformat.org’s. It’s just flipped and recolored– matches pixel for pixel.
I checked and you are a liar or a joker.
If by ‘intuitive’ you mean: a direct copy and paste from facebook, then yeah, sure.
I was quite excited by the TC article as this is one of the main ways I used to use Twitter – “track Dublin” to see who’s talking about what’s going on in Dublin (Ireland). Then I went to the site.
Why oh why do ‘local’ sites have to restrict themselves to a small number of cities? Another example is Yelp. How much hard coding can there be in these sites? Why not make the technology a platform for users to set up their own cities rather than dictating which cities are ’supported’?
In the case of Fwix, isn’t it just a monitor for mentions of certain cities on these web sites?
I’m probably over-simplifying but I’d like to understand where the complexity in ’supporting’ different areas is.
the problem with this product is that it can be replicated by facebook who has the userbase just like facebook replicated the features from friendfeed and now twitter with their mobile app.
HEY DARIAN, I KNOW YOU HATE MY IDEAS, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, START BUILDING PRODUCTS THAT MATTER…
I love the idea, but I wonder if this can be expanded to smaller cities as well, but probably there are enough news for such cities…
Everyblock.com covers more cities, offers drill-downs as narrow as a couple of blocks and reaches beyond the low-hanging fruit and unlocks siloed government data.
Oh yeah, they are going to open source their code in 2009.