The “Smart” News Aggregator
Tiinker, built by Deep Grey Labs, a start-up from Sydney Australia, is the new “intelligent news aggregator.” Essentially, it is an RSS reader that lets you vote stories as interesting or not interesting. Based on these votes, Tiinker is supposed to show you stories, via the numerous RSS feeds they consume, that are interesting to you. The site allows visitors to add their own RSS feeds as well which are added to the mix of stories presented to you.
The site is currently in private beta. In a recent blog at the Tiinker site, Oleg Sushkov posted his thoughts on some of the challenges that tiinker faces when opening to the public. One big challenge is getting the right word out, as Oleg put it. It is important for visitors to understand that tiinker is not just another RSS aggregator. Another challenge is getting new visitors to hang around long enough for tiinker to learn their preferences.
“In addition to the basic challenge of actually getting the word out, we also need to make sure that we get the right word out about what tiinker actually does. tiinker is not intended as primarily an RSS reader (although it does that just fine). It is an intelligent, personalised news aggregator. We are aiming tiinker at people who don’t necessarily know what an RSS feed is; users who just want to read news and explore beyond their local paper, but who do not want to spend time filtering out stories which do not interest them.”
One of the more well-known ones is Google News, but there are also social solutions like Newsvine that let the community decide what news items rise to the top based on what’s coming over the wire. Tiinker can be better described as a mix betweeen Google News and StumbleUpon.
Everything on the site is handled with three basic controls, a “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” button, and a way to bookmark content that goes into a separate feed that you can share with others. The service will also keep track of which stories you have marked as liking, so you can go back and read them later. In order to stop users limiting themselves to just a few types of content, there is also a “lucky” dip section, which chooses a story that is outside of your taste. There is the possibility of liking that however.
I am impressed with the idea of Tiinker and look forward to the final product. It’s definitely a handy way to get a plethora of new feeds and story suggestions and they’ll definitely have to find a way to win over social news service or feed aggregator like Feed Each Other, and the cool ideas of Streamy to get interesting news.
Until one truly wins me over, I will stick with Spotback and Newsvine. Which news aggregator site do you currently use? Which do you like best? We are curious here at TTB.
