Tiinker is the Anti-Digg
Whereas the social news service from Digg relies on members to select and rank
content, a new startup from Sydney, Australia, tiinker, does just the opposite: it treats
each member as an individual and learns what he or she likes. The service, an intelligent news aggregator, uses A.I.-like technology to determine your interests and then adapts to show you the news stories you will find most interesting. And since web 3.0 may be all about personalization, tiinker just might be the next big thing.
One of the first things you'll notice about tiinker is that you don't have to create an account to try it out. Tiinker will remember you for a while using a browser cookie. You can click "try it now" from the home page to start rating stories up or down without ever having to log in. If you like the service, though, you'll want to create an account to save those rankings.
The interface itself is slick, fast, and easy to use. By default, tiinker aggregates content from thousands of news sources and blogs and sorts them into the categories of arts & entertainment, business, health & lifestyle, opinion, politics, science, sports, technology, and world. The stories are selected for you completely automatically, no humans involved. This is the key difference between tiinker and the other social news aggregators out there. With tiinker, story selection is all about you and what you are into - you can't even cross-reference your selections with others like you or your friends. This is a personalized news service, not a social network.
The news stories are chosen for you based on a complex mix of analysis of what they're about, how much you're interested in similar topics, how long ago they were published, where in the world they come from, and other factors. Tiinker will also sometimes present what they call "lucky dip" stories which are chosen to broaden the range of news you see, by exploring new topics outside of your common interests.
Ranking stories is as easy as clicking on the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and will help train tiinker to learn your preferences. You'll see stories becoming relevant to you after you've rated only a few articles, but it may take a few more visits for tiinker to really know what you like. The algorithm is continually learning as you use it and will get better at choosing interesting stories over time.
When you "thumbs down" an item, the service eliminates those kinds of stories from your profile right away. You also won't see stories appear from categories you don't browse. However, if you make a mistake and accidentally rank a story incorrectly, a useful feature allows you to click the thumbs icon again to undo your selection.
Another unique option is the ability for service to email you stories if desired. Upon signup, you can select to have tiinker email you stories daily, weekly, or never. You can also change this option in your settings at any time. There's an RSS feed available for your stories, and if you are interested in what the masses are reading, you can check out the "Popular" page, which has a feed as well. If you want to narrow it down further, each category page has a personalized feed and a popular feed, too.
If you start running out of things to read, you can click the "only unseen stories" link to see all the stories that have never been displayed for you. You might surprise yourself and find something of interest here.
To mark stories and save them for later by, you click the book icon underneath the item, which will save it to your "Scrapbook," a section of the site that holds saved stories. Of course, there's a feed for this as well.
Tiinker looks like a great service to help you sort through the massive
amount of news published daily and gives you a more personal alternative
to sites like Digg. However, advanced RSS users will probably still want to use
their feed readers in order to maintain control over their news sources, perhaps
only using tiinker feeds to supplement their current RSS list. Still,
the service is a big step forward in the capabilities of machine learning and
for that alone, it's worth a look.
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I clicked on some of the categories, and all it displayed was "No more stories — you've seen the entire Internet!"... kind of a funny thought - it looks like they might have launched a bit prematurely.
Isn't this basically what www.thoof.com was? It's a cool concept, but they weren't exactly doing too hot..
My site http://blern.com is similar to Tiinker, except that I believe the recommendations are far more accurate and it also recommends blog posts.
Another key difference is that, although the recommendations are based on what you like, Blern can learn about you from your profiles on a variety of different social sites (such as Delicious, Digg, Reddit, MySpace, etc).
I find Presscue a brilliant alternative to Digg. It's wildly popular, and has extremely interesting content in both its main sections:
News, a democratic news feed aggregator and you.presscue a social bookmarking service.
"tiinker just might be the next big thing."
Really? This kind of reporting is what disappoints me a little about the whole Web2.0 hype machine. Ever heard of findory.com (it was shutdown in Nov 2007). Here is an excerpt:
"A reader first coming to Findory would see a normal front page of news, the popular and important news stories of the day. When someone read articles on the site, Findory learned what stories interested that reader and changed the news that was featured to match that reader's interests. In this way, Findory built each reader a personalized front page of news."
How about feeds2.com? persai.com? You could probably find a dozen startups doing essentially this.
It is an interesting concept, and while it is not the first to go about doing this, it will be exciting to see if it continues and succeeds.
I also got "No more stories — you've seen the entire Internet!" quite fast.... :( Wonder how long we'll have to wait before we'll have enough content to choose from.
how many of these sites do we really need? Every week there are a dozen or so more that are trying to topple digg and the others. Considering my stuff never gets dugg I'm not a huge fan but these rivals get buried as fast as my posts do on digg. With so many options out there I could easily spend my entire morning trying to get my blog exposure, instead of, you know, blogging.
Yes, this is definitely very similar to Thoof. The only thing I don't like about Thoof is that the vast majority of the content is very light-hearted and viral in nature. If you like to mix your business and pleasure, it's not that great.
Personally, I don't want something to pick stories based on my preferences. I'd rather just have good navigation so I can easily get to what I want at a particular time. Enjoying a story about one thing on one day doesn't guarantee that I want to see more of the same.
"No more stories — you've seen the entire Internet!"
More like
"No more stories — you've seen our crappy website."
thanks for the info.. I'm looking for some other alternative to digg actually. I hope it works as what it sepouse to..
Well, may be is new, may be has somme errors, i´ll give a try.
Isn't this what Google Desktop News gadget does? Granted without the ability to vote up or down on a story.