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Trapit, a personalized tool for discovering Web articles, opens to the public today. Trapit crawls roughly 100,000 sites, adding more sources every week, to provide users with the most relevant content from deep within the Web, not just the popular or SEO-spammy results. It's built on the same AI technology as Apple's Siri, which means it learns what interests you and gives you better suggestions over time.

You enter a search term for whatever you want, which you can save as a "trap" that will automatically refresh with new content as it's published around the Web. Every time you log in, you'll see new stuff to read, and the suggestions get more personal every day. The Web app launches today at trap.it, but Trapit was developed as a platform, so this is only the first stage. "We expect to power sites and services across the Web," CEO and co-founder Gary Griffiths says.

Thoora, your robot buddy for exploring and sharing topics on the Web, is coming to Android tablets, and maybe even to your new Kindle Fire. Thoora's new app, optimized for Android 3.0, is available in the Android Market now for free. The team plans to submit to the Amazon Appstore after testing on a Kindle Fire, and an iPad version and smartphone apps are coming before the end of the year.

The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.

With a Web full of stuff, discovery is a hard problem. Search engines were the first tools on the scene, but their rankings still have a hard time identifying relevance the same way a human user would. These days, social networks are the substitute for content discovery, and even the major search engines are using your social signals to determine what's relevant for you. But the obvious problem with social search is that if your friends haven't discovered it yet, it's not on your radar.

At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda has announced his resignation as editor-in-chief of Slashdot after 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted. In his farewell post, Malda cites "dramatic" changes to the Internet since Slashdot's inception. "For me," writes Malda, "the Slashdot of today is fused to the Slashdot of the past. This makes it really hard to objectively consider the future of the site. While my corporate overlords and I haven't seen eye to eye on every decision in the last decade, I am certain that Jeff Drobick and the other executives at Geeknet will do their best."

One of the first social networking aggregators to take advantage of LinkedIn's brand-new API is Sobees, whose two client applications both now offer LinkedIn integration in addition to the other supported networks. A challenger to similar services like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowser, Sobees is a social networking aggregation tool originally launched as a desktop app back in 2008 with a web app version added earlier this year. Like its competitors, Sobees' clients use a columnar interface to display real-time updates from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

Feedly, the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year, is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work.

Last week we introduced you to FriendDeck, a new online application that lets you monitor FriendFeed in a way that's very similar to how the Adobe AIR app, TweetDeck, monitors Twitter. Within FriendDeck's columns, you can track FriendFeed searches, users, friends, lists, rooms, and more.

Recently, FriendDeck developer Paul Kinlan released an Adobe AIR application of his FriendFeed tracking tool. Although still rough around the edges, this app has potential to become a viable alternative interface to FriendFeed for the service's heaviest users.