Solo Technology

Posted on January 22, 2007   4 Comments

Have you played with Spotback yet? After seeing a handful of references to it over the last few days I started checking it out over the weekend to see what all the shouting is about.

Short version: It is really quite cool!

Know what I like the most about it? After just a little bit of customization, it is showing me genuinely interesting articles — and not the same ones I see over and over at most other aggregators. I’m seeing stuff from sites and blogs that I don’t normally read, or was not even aware of. Personalized news that actually seems to work is pretty cool stuff.

Pretty simple to use too. After signing up, just do the “Choose Categories” thing to start customizing (the Getting Started page is actually worth checking out). Articles can be rated, which works about how you’d expect when presented with a little slider. However, as an article is rated, another similar article magically appears. If I understand this properly, rating articles contributes to what is presented in the future.

Fun stuff and raising up to “Daily Read” status. A nice site to visit to see what’s going on outside of the world I usually read.

What isn’t here? RSS feeds. Maybe the Personalized Alerts thing will offer it, but not the “main” area. Seems like feeds would be nice — but then again, would miss out on the scoring and tweaking (and page hits…).

I haven’t explored NewsSnacks yet, but that might be interesting too. At first glance, looks like a take on the ajax homepage type sites but for feeds only (think Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc).

Tags: aggregate, ajax, news, Personal, rss, spotback

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