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June 18, 2010

Fwix – Follow the Local News

Fwix is a web-app that aims to be the go-to destination for up to the minute, breaking news in your local area—wherever that local area may be. Unless you live in a major metropolis, it can often be difficult to filter out the national news and find out what’s going on in your specific town. Now, Fwix does that for you. The application distills the news about your city and lets you choose which updates you’d like to receive. So if you’re not into sports—or politics, or business, for example—then you don’t have to see stories about that topic in your news feed each morning. Instead, you’ll just see the news stories that you want to read.

Getting started with Fwix could not be easier. The website can already tell where you’re at, so you don’t even need to input your hometown to begin. Fwix will give you a list of basic topics, similar to those you’d see in a daily newspaper—such as arts, real estate, and education—and you can decide for yourself which you want to follow. In addition to the basic news categories, the application also features city-specific feeds that can give you information on things like crime rates, road closures, and even popular bands or companies in your hometown. When you’ve chosen a handful of topics you’d like to follow, go to your Fwix custom homepage. You’ll find a layout similar to Twitter, with headlines and short blurbs about news stories that fall into the categories you’ve selected. Click on any headline to read the entire story, or click on the news category to see similar stories that have been posted online.

If you’ve got something to say about your community, then Fwix will let you say it. The application lets users post messages of their own in individual categories, which will appear in the news feed for that category for everyone else to see. If your hometown newspaper isn’t delivering the stream of news that you’d like to read, then it might be worthwhile to check out Fwix and find out what’s really going on in your neck of the woods.

Practical Uses:

  • Read news about your hometown
  • Find out instantly when an article has been written about your employer
  • Post updates regarding road closures or other community events
  • Be the first to find out when something is going on in your city

Insider Tips:

  • Create an account or login with your Facebook information
  • Follow as many news categories as you wish
  • Make a user profile page to better distinguish yourself as a news source when you post messages on the site
  • Algorithms determine which news is the hottest in your particular city

What we liked:

  • Fwix is currently available in over 80 communities
  • Design is much cleaner than some other news aggregators
  • News is collected from both traditional news sources and blogs
  • Facebook app brings Fwix news content to any Facebook page

What we didn’t like:

  • Fwix may not be available in your community yet, especially if you live in a rural area

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: August 2008
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: San Francisco, California
  • Founded by: Darian Shirazi
  • Web site: http://fwix.com

Costs:

  • Free

Comments

  1. Cool..new to my ear..

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  2. The application distills the news about your city and lets you choose which updates you’d like to receive.

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