Mobile World Congress is happening now in Barcelona. As much as we’d like to buy our paella salads at the La Boqueria before a day on the trade show floor, the editorial team is instead stuck here in NJ.
To help with my remote coverage, which involves monitoring tweets, decrypting media releases, and studying the keynote videos, I decided to take another look at Xydo. It’s the crowd-based recommendation service I wrote about a few months ago. Plus I’ve been informed it’s been re-designed.
As with other sites in this genre, the crowd votes on content, which is pulled in from a number of different sources and categorized into various topic areas.
Topics encompass this whole wide world—pasta and grains, business news, mobile, movies, and on and on
So I entered “mobile world congress” into Xydo’s global search box.
Xydo picked up about 20 or so articles in total. The ones with recommendations from the community were listed first, and then you can expand to view the rest. Within the list was a Mobile World overview article from the dailywireless, presumably one of this site’s default feeds. This entry had also been endorsed by a Xydodian. Good choice.
Xydo’s Mobile topic area
Another source of recommendations are tweets, which you can let Xydo tap into and share with the community. Xydo parses these micro-posts and places them automatically into a relevant topic.
I had previously configured myself to follow about seven or so topics, including Mobile, which was my next destination. Guessing that news about Mobile World Congress would more likely show up in the “Newest’ tab, I clicked to see what Xydo had in store for me.
Xydo’s digital umpa lumpas picked up a post about a “Facebook phone” introduced at Mobile World by HTC. The original source of this content was Gigaom, a news site I follow anyway, but it was reassuring, in a way, that another Xydo user had recommended it.
Minor gripe: there isn’t a tool to search or filter content in a given category area; I found out about the Facebook phone announcement using my FireFox browser’s built-in page search box.
Some of the new features in this current version of Xydo (still in beta) include a vote counting mechanism and smoother AJAX page transitions between tab clicks.
The power with recommendation sites such as Xydo is the community, and as the number of users grow and more eyes are looking at the content, the suggestions become more interesting.
While I didn’t have a serendipity experience this time around, I’ll check back again in a few months.
Related articles
- Do I Need a Web Recommendation Service? (technoverseblog.com)
