We all know how quickly news spread these days, how content can go viral in a matter of seconds. We all have our regular sites that we periodically (or obsessively, as the case may be) check in to in order to keep updated on the latest news stories, events, trends, gossip etc. But how can one possibly stay au courrant on ALL the important stories of the moment, from across all sorts of media? Up until now, the prospect has seemed daunting if not completely impossible.
Enter Wordlink – a new startup company that has developed an app that helps you keep track of all the viral content on the world wide web. The app scans the viral headlines of the day from tens of thousands of sources, ranked by their activity on all social networks, and feeds them back to you on one clean interface. The stories you get are purely representational of the most commented on / viewed/ clicked-on / tweeted about / shared items from around the world. This makes for a news feed that is free from editorialization — a freedom that one can rarely find these days.
Sources include everything from The New York Times, to The Huffington Post, to Buzzfeed, to lil old us here at The Concordian. Wordlink crowdsources and data-mines viral content from all the major social media platforms to deliver content that is relevant to what people are talking about.
The app lets you filter the content you receive by building a “Favourites” list of all your go-to sources, or allows you to sift through all their partners’ headlines by category. They seem to have every category imaginable: Press, Research, Social, Arts, Business, Sports, Health… the interface reads like the world’s most comprehensive news site. There’s even an icon that lets you view the picture-heavy dashboard icons (being the links to stories that you can follow) as a more traditional layout, with news columns that allow you to read the story’s first sentence before clicking.
Once inside a source search or content category, you can then personalize your feed even further by choosing to see the viral headlines of the day, week, month, or year – making it easy to go back and look at the most important moments of recent history.
The app was created by four Montrealers, Nadav Perez, Allan Morais, Charles Taylor, and Rodrigo Vergara, all of whom are Concordia alum. The company still has strong ties with the current generation of Concordians as well, as most of their interns are Concordia students.
The Wordlink team will be coming to our campus during the first week of classes in order to promote their app to students.
Wordlink has already received some pretty impressive accolades – they were chosen as the winners of the Cossette Agency Lab’s startup competition for new businesses. Cossette is an International digital marketing agency, and their lab aims to help startups find their footing, and allows them to benefit from a mentorship program at the Agency.
You can check out the Wordlink interface at wordlink.com or download it from the App Store. It’s a free download, so it doesn’t seem like there’s anything to lose by trying it out!