Hands on: Fwix, the local news and social aggregator

Location-aware services are exploding on both the desktop and in our pockets (no, we aren't just happy to see you). While being able to view Flickr photos shot in your city or to see local microblogging posts on Twitter is fun and all, we haven't seen anyone really aggregate location-based media into one lifestream to provide a birds-eye view of what's going on across news outlets, social networks, and other UGC communities.

A new company called Fwix is trying its hand at solving this problem with a location-based media aggregation service, and we had a chance to speak with Darian Shirazi, the company's CEO.

You are here—and so are all these other people

The simple idea behind Fwix (short for "Feed with a mix") is to pipe in updates from a wide variety of news sources and social networks, then sift through it all to provide a custom "lifestream" relevant to a major US city. Things like local New York Times articles, Yahoo Upcoming events, Orbitz deals, Craigslist posts, Indeed job listings, Brightkite social network updates, geotagged Flickr photos, and even videos from YouTube and Vimeo can all be listed in a city's lifestream. It's a great way to keep tabs on what's going on across all these outlets without having to visit them all separately, let alone sign up for each one.

During Fwix's development process over the last two months, the site was aggregating nearly 500,000 stories per day and filtering them down to about 2,000 stories for each of the five major cities it was serving. For a new release today, Shirazi told Ars Technica that Fwix now collects over 2 million stories for a total of 26 cities. Fwix's range of sources has expanded quite a bit as well, as it now watches 35 online communities including Yelp for retail and restaurant reviews, Yahoo Answers, Hulu, Delicious bookmarks, and more.

Fwix is also debuting a Globalized Comments feature today, allowing users to comment on any feed item. To help users find items that are being talked about, Fwix's right column collects the latest comments from a city's lifestream, with a link to the news or media item being commented on. Fwix's comment system could use some work, however, because news updates don't have permalinks at all. If a discussion builds on a particular item in Fwix's feed, there's no easy way to bookmark it to come back later or share it with friends.

When asked how Fwix filters through all of this content, Shirazi told Ars, "The most interesting way is by tracking Google Trends and then correlating that with the stories. In addition, we try to cut a lot of stories out because they're malformed or are rated poorly by the source-provider's internal system. But there's lots more we're keeping secret right now."

Considering the freshness of Fwix's launch, it remains to be seen whether the secrecy of that sauce will affect the service's spread among users. In our testing, though, Fwix provided a balanced mix of content from each service, with some simple tools for filtering based on content type. Fwix's default category of "Top Stories" appears to mix all types of content together, while other options like "Events," "Photos & Video," "News," "Chatter," and "Other" offer some useful ways to drill down to specific types of content.

Signing up for Fwix requires nothing more than an e-mail and a password, though the only benefit to sign-up that we could find so far is commenting on feed items. In the future, we'd really like to see the ability to filter out some services entirely, such as the option to shut off Delicious posts or Yelp reviews so they never appear in a city's feed.

In a few weeks, Shirazi said that Fwix will introduce an iPhone app that brings a little more interactive functionality to the table. Instead of just reading and commenting on news entries, Fwix's iPhone version will let users share individual items with friends or strangers in a particular area. This adds a new and powerful layer of functionality to Fwix as not just an aggregation service but a broadcasting tool as well.

Show us the money

We asked Shirazi about Fwix's business model, and it refreshingly goes beyond basic advertising.

"Within the next coming weeks, we'll start recommending sponsored content that is related to specific feed items rather than the page as a whole," Shirazi explained. "We can show a much broader variety of ads on each page thereby increasing the chances that people will actually click on ads."

Fwix is capitalizing on location-based ads without the help of advertising giant Google, Shirazi continued, as "Google has tried with their Coupon API, but they simply don't have enough localized content to make good money off local ads."

Shirazi also told us that that individual city ad agencies have approached the company for advertising partnerships, but he was quick to point out that "we're focused on providing the best user experience and will only be showing advertisements that are relevant and related to the content we distribute."

A quirk we noticed about Fwix's overall design is that it bears a striking resemblance to Facebook's recent redesign. When we first started testing Fwix, it even appeared to use a very similar color palette, though it has since been distinguished with a brighter palette that better matches Fwix's vibrant blue logo.