After a semi-private 10 week incubation period kicked off in mid-February, XYDO is ready to bring its social network to the public. Focused on news to bring socially-endorsed content from your streams to you, finding the best content powered by your connections, XYDO wades into a crowded field of news consumption apps - many of whom have opted to focus on mobile or iPad instead of the Web, where they argue the majority of people still go for news.In a detailed brief released alongside their unveiling at midnight Eastern time tonight, XYDO says, "iPad reader apps, while theyʼve gotten a lot of attention, represent a tiny fraction of how online news is consumed," taking aim at products including Flipboard, News.me, Pulse and Zite, most of whom have made the iPad their launchpad. XYDO also highlights the availability of their content by dedicated social streams, such as those on Twitter which lead with an "x_", such as "@x_startups".
In February, when first encountering XYDO, I highlighted its similarities to the much discussed Quora. It seems this has resonated, as the company's founders see it as Quora mixed with Digg. You get the ability to engage with shared content on the site, but the numbers continue to drive the highlighted content, with shares on social sites pushing numbers ever higher, which they call "social endorsement", as opposed to "non-prioritized, purely reverse chronological order", common from streams like Twitter and Flipboard.
Like the vast majority of sites that talk the personalization game, XYDO appears to be leaning heavily on social collaborative filtering to divine the top news for you, tapping your social connections to surface interesting content, and organize it by topic. You can then filter the content based on your interests.
Its debatable whether this social news network can surface interesting conversations on the shared content, as Quora has, but it does serve as a curated alternative to the single sourced Paper.li and other personalized newspapers that grew like mushrooms last year. If you didn't get into Xydo a few months ago, you no longer need an invitation, so go to it. You can find me at http://www.xydo.com/users/978/submissions.
Disclosures: my6sense, where I am vice president of marketing, presents personalized streams on mobile devices and offers an API for users. Theoretically, this means we compete or could partner with some elements of Xydo, Flipboard, Pulse and News.me.