RSS Feeds
Tiinker is Like a Personal Digg for Feeds
Posted by Lifehacker US Edition at 3:00 AM on January 15, 2008
News feed aggregator tiinker aims to help those feeling overwhelmed by their news portals and their own feed readers chop down their lists. Using Digg-style "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" controls, tiinker "learns" what types of news and sources you find relevant and interesting and mixes its content for you accordingly. Tiinker's technology page reshaped itself pretty quickly to a little test-voting with an eye for Linux items, but what's missing right now (and used to be offered) is a way to bring in RSS feeds not offered by the tiinker mix. Still, for those seeking out a decent, customised news portal, Tiinker might be a good way to keep on top of what's happening.
Tags: digg | feed readers | feeds | news | news aggregation | newsreader
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
mahalie
Posted 10:01 AM 14/1/08
After doing some outreach to smart geeks I know I find that Google's friends shared items are quite taking care of this!
mahalie
kostik_y2k
Posted 9:13 AM 14/1/08
Mindity (www.mindity.com) uses the same concept and is a waaaay better. See screens at [www.mindity.com]
kostik_y2k
Jeff Axelrod
Posted 10:44 AM 14/1/08
@kostik_y2k:
Kostik:
I'm not sure how mindity is better. It certainly appears different. My understanding is that tiinker applies artificial intellgience of some sort (collaborative filtering?) to adapt its content to the tastes of each individual.
Mindity appears to me to use overall popularity as its criteria, making the assumption that what's good for the masses is good for the individual.
I've been suggesting that netvibes adopt a similar approach to what has now become available via mindity for a while now: the idea of using collaborative filtering to help deliver personalized content. I'm glad to see someone has realized this.
Jeff
Jeff Axelrod
andoatnp
Posted 12:15 PM 14/1/08
My understanding is that Thoof [www.thoof.com] offers a similar service, but I haven't been using it long enough to train it's algorithm to my taste to see if is good at what it does. Anyone else been using it and have any thoughts?
andoatnp
engtech
Posted 12:09 PM 14/1/08
I'm really hoping someone smart at Google is looking at adding filtering features to Reader.
There has to be a good way of figuring out which items out of my 1000+ unread feeds are "best bets"
engtech
phoenix
Posted 2:04 PM 14/1/08
It's funny, I used Thoof for a long long time, and really couldn't get past the limited number of sources that it had, and how easy it was for a few people with a couple of personal blogs to wind up with their personal blog entries on the front page. I reviewed it a couple of months ago:
[www.appscout.com]
But at the same time, Thoof has indeed come a long long way. At the same time, I vastly prefer Tiinker, and if you liked Thoof, you'll like Tiinker too. Tiinker has more features, and gives you way more control over what you see and what you don't see. In fact, I took a look at Tiinker last month:
[www.appscout.com]
And found it pretty spot on. It's improved a bit since then and opened itself up to the public. I kind of dig it, if you can get past the immediate complaint that most people have about it: that it creates a bubble of news around you that only you're interested in.
phoenix
Cawboy
Posted 1:57 PM 14/1/08
Tiinker is awesome, well worth a try. Easy and fast, hones in on what i like to see. Saves lots of time browsing useless news. Haven't tried any other sites though.
Cawboy
kostik_y2k
Posted 2:59 PM 14/1/08
@Jeff Axelrod:
Firstly, mindity is a desktop client, not a web app. Secondly, it uses social networking functions for this "collaborative filtering" - only feeds/articles from the people *you trust* are recommended to you.
Kostik
kostik_y2k