We have recently released a new Tutorial in order to help our new users.
Best feedback we could get is from our long time Spotback addicts.
Is there any function you think we should add to our new Tutorial?
Your feedbacks will much appreciated @ feedback{at}Spotback.com.
Thank you on behalf of the Spotback team.
Our goal has always been personalizing the web and helping each user get his own personalized web experience.
Our long time mission has been recently supported by the 2006 ChoiceStream Personalization Survey.
The survey provides insight into consumers’ interest in personalization.
Some of the 2006 survey findings are:
79% of consumers are interested in receiving personalized content.
75% of consumers believe that personalization would improve their social networking experience by introducing them to other members with similar interests and preferences.
We believe this is the first indication the web’s new frontier in personalizing users' content in order to maximize their personal web experience.
Chris Kasten wrote about "Spotback — An Interesting Approach to Personal News"
In his Solo-Technology blog.
“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! “
Thank you Chris, we believe it takes one to know one.
Jason Clarke just wrote about “SpotBack - a customizable news aggregation site” in his downloadsquad blog .
“Right off the bat I was impressed with the pleasant and easy to read user interface. It's not overdone, just attractive and approachable. Clicking a headline opens the article in a new browser window or tab. Rating stories is achieved through the use of an interactive slider; slide it to the left to rate a story negatively, or to the right to give it a positive rating. Interestingly, if you give an article a positive rating, SpotBack will immediately display a related article immediately below the one you just rated, giving you the opportunity to get more information about a subject you've shown an interest in. Slick”.
We are extremely happy Jason found our new version pleasant and slick.
James Kendrick from jkOnTheRun.com posted a story titled: "Move over Techmeme, here comes Spotback".
From the post:
"...I recently found the Spotback site ... and my experience so far says they are succeeding. Spotback takes news from a lot of sources, culls out the ones that you’ve indicated you are most interested in, and presents them in a nice newspaper-like format consisting of excerpts of the stories. If you see one you like just click the headline and it opens another browser window with the original news article for your reading pleasure. One of the coolest features of Spotback is the rating system. Each article has a rating slider that the logic behind Spotback uses to determine what you like to read. Over time I am finding it to get uncannily accurate and I enjoy visiting the site daily."
To read James Kendrick's full post, visit jkOnTheRun.com
There is a good high-level overview article by Emre Sokullu and Richard MacManus from Read/Write Web on Personalized News.
From the article:
"Personalized Content is one of the two most popular approaches in next generation news sites - the other is Power of Masses, which we will cover in a future post ... First a brief technical explanation: the Personalized Content approach uses a very similar technique to spam detection software. The idea is that everyone has their own pattern of reading. To recognize your pattern, Personalized Content services omit stopwords and extract keywords from the news you read - then use Bayesian Statistical analysis to predict what kind of news you will like or dislike in future..."
And the article concludes:
"...Our guess is that personalized content will become a more popular paradigm in about 1 to 2 years, provided of course that the technical challenges can be overcome. Which is by no means certain, since a lot of smart developers think that personalized content is a huge challenge.
Personalized news has a couple of main attractions. Theoretically, if your news is personalized then it's not as vulnerable to gaming as the power of masses approach. Plus people are getting busier everyday, so personalized news has a strong appeal as a potential solution for information overload.
We're not sure who will end up being the key player in this space - maybe a giant like Google, maybe an existing startup like reddit, or maybe a whole new startup. But one thing we're sure of: the current personalized news services still need more work and the technical issues around personalizing content are far from solved."
The article covers: Reddit, Spotback, SearchFox (now Yahoo!), Feeds2.0, LeapTag and Findory.
Go read it here.
TalkingApes.com names 6 Web sites that make the net super-awesome:
Sites mentioned in the list: YouTube.com, TechCrunch.com, Spotback.com, Wikipedia.com, Wordpress, FeedDigest.com
From the story:
...Spotback serves news based on your ratings, serving you news that you care about and discarding that which you don’t — making it one of THE sites on the net for everyone. This kind of technology is extremely useful in making sure you’ve got EVERYONE covered.
We are honored!
Web 2.0 = WOW!!If you have not tried Spotback yet, you really need to! I did not think I would be this Wowed again for quite some time but this web application is knocking my socks off today.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Thanks a lot!
Story by Ryan Singel from the August 2006 issue of PC World magazine
Link: http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,126113,pg,3,00.asp
"So much news on the Web, so little time to read it all. These tools and sites can help make you an incredibly well-informed person--in a hurry."
"...Spotback, a site that debuted in May and offers several ways for you to adjust which stories you see. A slider bar lets you indicate how much you like each story on a scale of -5 to +5. Also, drop-down 'Less' and 'More' menus let you block a news source, category, or subcategory, or request more stories from it.
Spotback's excellent user interface puts a yellow background behind the stories you've read, and when you rate a story you get instant feedback: The site uses Ajax (a popular Web programming technique that employs behind-the-scenes browser requests to make Web sites feel more like desktop apps) to magically slot in a related story directly below the one you've just rated. Regrettably, Spotback falters on the matter of timeliness. The 'Computers and Internet' section sometimes features six- and seven-day-old stories--an eon in online news time."
Also mentioned: Techmeme, Memeorandum.com, Findory, Digg, Reddit, Rojo and more.
Regarding Singel's closing comment: Spotback offers the option to choose not to show stories older than 'x' days. This option was set to 10 days by default and was recently changed into 3 days. Users may chance this setting at any time.
Story about Spotback on TechCrunch made it to the #1 place on digg.com homepage!
This is the second time that Spotback is mentioned at TechCrunch. The first time was when Mike Arrington visited Israel and met with a number of start-ups including us. Mike’s first story brought Spotback to the spotlights and took us out of anonymity - if we could only share the opportunities those very few words at TechCrunch opened for us you would have never believed it anyway. Today Mike wrote a full review about Spotback at TechCrunch almost immediately followed by numerous other bloggers.
TechCrunch is really a perfect example of how the new Internet and economy works. The ability to easily voice out ideas and form a loyal community around mutual fields of interest and styles as TechCrunch managed so successfully to do, inspires us in our efforts to create a service based on the power of the community to filter out the gold from the tremendous amount of fresh information floating out on the Internet.
I am sure we will follow up on the TechCrunch effect in the future.
Thank you Mike.