I have to admit I’m somewhat skeptical about RSS readers that “adapt to my reading habits” and serve me the “stories I like”. The reason is simple: I’ve tried out many (some similar services are now defunct Findory and Spotplex), and none have ever worked out that well for me. It’s probably the nature of my job: I need to follow all tech stories anyway; it would be very hard even for a human editor to create a subset which would include only the stories I need and leave out only the unimportant ones.
Enter Tiinker (second choice domain name, I reckon), an RSS reader and recommendation engine in which you can vote stories up and down, while Tiinker will try to learn from your preferences and - in theory - eventually show only the stories you want to read.
Let’s leave that bit aside for a second, and focus on the other stuff Tiinker offers. Immediately upon logging in, I feel crippled by the lack of options. I can’t rearrange feeds in the way I like; I cannot make individual items bigger or smaller; I can’t read only the titles; I can’t choose to fit more or less feeds on a page, etc. In short, I can’t do 90% of the things I can do with Google Reader, Netvibes or Bloglines, and this is an immediate deal breaker for me.
What can I do? Well, I can add stories to my scrapbook, I can add my own feeds or an OPML file…and that’s about it. I know Tiinker is in private beta stage, but this simply isn’t enough. People who are serious about their feeds want more options, period.
Getting back to the “learning” part, I guess it takes time, but after a while I’m not noticing any revolutionary changes. I’ve voted some stories up and some down, and while Tiinker has adapted to some degree, I still don’t feel like I’m getting the stories I need. Perhaps this is partly due to the lack of configuration options, so I can’t organize my feeds in any meaningful manner, but Tiinker seems useful only for casual reading, in the oh-let’s-see-what’s-cool-today sense. For me, it’s just a random, poorly organized bunch of feeds.
The fact is, in order to have a chance of succeeding, Tiinker needs to have most of the major options that the competition already has - and then slap their AI recommendation engine on top of that. It’s not likely to gain many converts as it is.
User comment: By: David NovakovicThough I don't agree that machines are incapable of making good recommendations, i DO agree that http://feedeachother.com is brilliant as an rss reader, and that friends are a good way of finding good content. :)
User comment: By: UdiAutomated recommendations simply don't work well enough. No one trusts "the machine" to get things exactly right. The answer lies in interpersonal recommendations. While you won't trust "the machine" until some time in the next millennium, you already trust your friends and colleagues to tell you about interesting stuff. You share and discuss with each other every day by email and around the water cooler. The right approach is a full featured RSS reader with a social layer that helps you to easily share with and learn from your own network of contacts. See what your friends subscribe to and let them help you sift through that never ending stream of stuff. See: http://feedeachother.com
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