Just The Facts, Jack. Just The Facts.
I used to be addicted to my RSS reader. Now I basically never use it anymore. I’m not sure the last time I had Google Reader open, but it’s just the backend for Reeder now. And even that is just my “catch all” to check quickly at the end of the day.
Instead, I use Twitter, and Facebook, and Tumblr, and Flipboard, and Pulse, and Techmeme to catch up on the news. I used to think I’d miss things this way. But I don’t. If anything, I get the news faster because humans are faster at tweeting things than Google Reader was at delivering the feeds.
The problem with this method of scanning the news is that it’s not all that scanable. For every news story, there will be 20 other personal tweets or status updates from friends.
That’s where Wavii comes in. The CrunchFund portfolio company launched earlier this week after years (quite literally) in the making.
At a high level, Wavii takes a look at the news being published on the web and extracts the key elements of any story. It then presents this information in Facebook Newsfeed-esque snippets. So, for example, if “Rovio Mobile warns that fake versions of Angry Birds contain malware designed to attack your Android phone.” — an actual Wavii snippet right now — you can easily read that rather than having to read an entire 500-word story on the issue, hunting for the facts.
