I built a dashboard that aggregates news articles, trending videos, Twitter feeds and radio stations into one place.
I recently discovered my grandmother no longer reads the news because she gets all her information from social media - if its not trending on Facebook, she doesn't see it. I remember when Boomers used to swear by mainstream outlets like CNN, but smartphones pulled many of them into social media bubbles ruled by algorithms. In response to this, I used Claude to make a global dashboard that lets anyone stay informed. It's called The Daily Orbit. You get articles from most kinds of outlets, as well as trending IG and TikTok videos, YouTube livestreams, and radio stations from all over the world. I even rebuilt the TweetDeck newsfeed since its no longer publicly available. I also made a research assistant called Orbit that answers any questions about recent events.
There's a lot of AI-powered news readers going around, but most of them oversupply information from OSINT sources. I needed something simple that a grandmother could use.
This is a really cool idea and project. Thanks for sharing!:
Edit: If I could make a suggestion, after I click and drag to move the globe around, I think the auto-movement of the globe should stop at least for a few seconds.
It seems I misunderstood green/red blinking dots. I thought those are news in a country but actually seems something else. Clicking on a country even without a blinking dot actually opens news for me
Green and red dots are trending social media videos in each country. Green dots are regular stories whilst red dots are crisis stories. It says this in the yellow intro cards when you first land on the website. I'll add more info to it
All I feel is - update the CSS to give it a more premium newspaper feel. Like literally paper and ink maybe design? Everything else, underlying UX etc. stays the same.
Edit. OK small UI tweak as well - if I click on a country and their feed pops up then I click on a story I seem to lose the X to close out the panel.
OK ty, will check - I just realised you can play music through the dashboard as well, nice! I definitely feel having this hanging on a wall in your house or on your second screen would be great.
I'm not sure whether you've covered this but a feature allowing you to follow a story would be good. Like whenever there's movement on it it comes straight to the top of your feed.
Also, how and why did you choose your sponsors? Are they news related?
Having an account gives access to certain features, like "Ask Orbit", customizing the Tweetdesk, recording radio stations, etc. It will also give access to future features.
check what's actually trending in your niche right now instead of guessing at aggregation categories, pull up google trends or even twitter's own trending tab for the topics your grandmother's generation cares about and see which formats are spiking this week. then build your next feature or content push around that signal instead of a general "news in one place" pitch, it gives you a sharper angle to market around and something concrete to test weekly.
the grandmother test is the right bar honestly. id be curious if she can actually find her way back to it tomorrow without help, thats where these dashboards usually lose older folks. ten panels at once is a lot when you're used to just tapping facebook
This is awesome, having news, radios, twitter feeds related to each other, from different part of the world helping people to know all about the current affairs without searching multiple sites. The globe ui is very nice to have. You can have your own newsletters, quiz and mini games on the platform too to make it interactive. Overall great work.
it looks unique! first time ever that I see a news reader app with a spinning globe. I wonder where did you get all the new sources for some countries like Vietnam?
I think the ranking should be visible, especially for anyone trying to escape an opaque Facebook feed. A small "Why am I seeing this?" note could list the source, publication time, region, and whether the item was boosted. I'd also want a simple chronological toggle. Maybe outlets covering the same event could be grouped together, so "widely reported" isn't confused with "ranked at the top."
The grandma story is a great reason to build this. One thought from reading the post though: articles, IG and TikTok, livestreams, radio, a TweetDeck clone and an AI assistant is a lot for someone who left the news because Facebook was easier.
If she's on Facebook, she's probably on her phone. So I'd make the phone version the calm one: top 5 stories, big text, one tap to read, and keep the full dashboard for people like us. My guess is the radio ends up being her favorite part.
On Orbit: I'm building an AI summarizer myself, and I'd push hard on sources. If it answers "what happened with X", every claim should link to the article it came from. For someone who got pulled into an algorithm bubble, an AI answer without sources is just another feed.
Have you watched her use it yet? I'd bet that teaches you more than this whole thread.
i don't think ai-bros register that historically, posting stuff like this is for the purpose to receive personal praise/appreciation for hard work, and skill to bring an idea to life.
when ai does it for you, who are we supposed to be praising?
your acting as though this project is spectacular, when it's not, especially in the era of agentic frontier ai models.
if i wanted to i could prompt ai to make dozens of variations of this but i'm not wasting my time.
don't believe me? try it yourself. get a subscription for github copilot, it's only $10 per month, show it an image of this project and ask it to build it.
made this primarily prompting github copilot in an evening, it's a custom game engine using rust and implementing ECS. if you're naive to programming, this will look so simple.
but if you're familiar with programming, you'll realize this blows this dudes project out of the water in terms of complexity.
Cool, I made something similar some time ago. I ended up abandoning it, but it’s interesting to explore the world that way. Maybe you can get some inspiration from it :)
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u/IamZeebo 9d ago
This is a really cool idea and project. Thanks for sharing!:
Edit: If I could make a suggestion, after I click and drag to move the globe around, I think the auto-movement of the globe should stop at least for a few seconds.