Fwix, a social news site that skims through dozens of web services to generate a ‘News Feed’ for your city, has just released its free iPhone application (iTunes Link).
The application revolves around your ‘City Feed’, which offers an automated list of stories pulled from sources including local newspapers, blogs, and Yelp, to help users quickly find the most up-to-date news relevant to their region. Stories range from the hottest restaurant reviews and concerts to recent crime reports in the area, and are generally fairly relevant to your current location (though stories that seem pretty random do occasionally pop up). These feeds are also available on Fwix’s homepage, which launched last summer.
The application also brings a few entirely new features to the Fwix service. The first is the introduction of location-based checkins with friends (called ‘Neighbors’ by the app). The inclusion of the feature seems a bit odd at first – Fwix didn’t launch as a social network, and there a number of other services like Loopt and Brightkite that already have a huge head start in this space.
But founder Darian Shirazi says that Fwix still isn’t meant to act as a social network, explaining that these social connections are primarily meant to help friends share stories they find interesting with each other. He also says that Fwix (which probably would have a hard time competing as a stand-alone location based network), is planning to integrate with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, which means users will be able to update their location on Fwix using other services.
It’s not quite there yet, but the app’s most potentially useful feature is its heat map, which presents a visual representation of the most active areas in your city. An area’s ‘hotness’ is determined by the number of status messages, news stories, and other activity that has occurred in a region within the last few hours. It’s a great idea and it looks nice, but in its current form it’s not very useful because there’s no way to actually see which stories have made an area ‘hot’ (Shirazi says this feature will be included in the next release).
Which sources do they utilize to aggregate their messages / updates?
a ton of sources. our technology spiders rss feeds.
A pretty cool app and it looks better than google maps. Great post.
Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
Rally cool app. I just got it and I love the heatmap.
Too many junk iphone apps around – good to see an original and useful one come along.
that’s pretty ace
something tells me the original idea for this domain name was youtube-y.
This is something everyblock.com could look into..
fwix is a cool service. We are glad to see many live local music concerts in their events page coming from Livekick. See: http://fwix.com....php?tab=events
Nice post! Look at my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com
Congrats Darian – nice app – really useful.
thanks! but its not just me, took all the hard work of the team over here!
This is a great idea… I am trying to convince some local bloggers to get involved and I think this story would be something they should consider. They are trying to become the biggest thing in Royal Oak and with this app they can be! LOL!