Spotback News Weblog

Spotback has a new blog

Sun, 06 May 2007 05:06:31 -0800

Please update your bookmarks and RSS with the new address:

http://blog.spotback.com

The Spotback Music Project

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:39:51 -0800

In the past few months we've been approached several times by people asking
us to launch a Spotback personalized music aggregator. We've decided to put
our efforts in to it, and our team of experts managed to map a huge amount
of music resources.

Now - we're proud to announce the official release of the Spotback Music
Project where users control the music.

What can you expect from the Music Project?

Best music resources available mapped out to meet your
exact needs
New sub-categories: news, pop, MP3, alternative, gear,
industry, reviews, features, retro
Built in MP3 player - from now on if the feed has an MP3
link, you can listen to it on Spotback's front page
Daily updated blogs and music e-zines

Keep in mind that Spotback depends on each user's personal ratings. Once a
user rates a story, his personal profile is updated and the Spotback
algorithm starts searching for relevant stories that would match the user's
specific taste.

Drop by the Spotback Music Project and see for yourself.
http://music.spotback.com
Feedback will be much appreciated: maor (at) spotback (dot) com

Get Started

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 02:19:05 -0800

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.

Personalized Content

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 03:23:06 -0800

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.

Interesting Approach to Personal News

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:00:11 -0800

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.

Slick

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 02:41:39 -0800

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.

Spotback has launched a new release on January 14th.

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 02:20:28 -0800

Trying to implement some new personalizing features led us to a new release.
We hope this release could help you navigate more easily through out the site.
In order to help you get each feature in the simplest way possible we have changed landing page into a new category check box tool bar, opened the Tag Tracker option for all categories and upgraded site’s options best way we could.
Spotback has been through a face lift in order to maximize your experience.
In order to know whether we succeed in our mission or not we would love to hear your feed back.
What are you interested in? Do you have a new feature you believe Spotback should offer its community?

Please write Spotback Support [feedback at spotback.com]. We are waiting for your thoughts.

Spotback review on jkOnTheRun.com

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 13:49:48 -0800

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

Speed and performance optimization - part II

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:47:35 -0800

Following our first update to the site that focused on speed and overall performance we now released the second (and more visible) update.

We tested the site and its compatibility with different operating systems and browser types (including FF2 and IE7) and the site flies!

Now it is time that you give it a try and tell us what you think.

Personalized News: A Market Overview

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 07:15:33 -0800

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.

Major speed improvement

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 08:45:01 -0800

Spotback underwent a major code rewrite to improve the speed and responsiveness and is about 10(!) times faster according to our benchmarks.

Did it improve the experience for you? We will be happy to hear - drop us a note.

Spotback NewsSnacks (NEW!)

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 02:52:44 -0800

Spotback is rolling out NewsSnacks - a new RSS reader integrated with Spotback's personalization functionalities

Here's what you can do with NewsSnacks:

You can create your own page of favorite news sources by:
1. Adding feeds manually;
2. Importing feeds form OPML file;
3. Adding sources from Spotback Personal News page using the 'add to snacks' link near each source name.
You can choose from one of our pre-compiled Tasty Snack:
Web2.0
Breaking News
Gadgets
Tech News
Geek Talk
We will be adding more snacks very soon and we welcome you to share your favorite snack with us. We would also love to get recommendations for new snacks from you. Just use the 'share this page with your friends' link to send your snacks to: feedback@spotback.com.

Oh, and don't forget that you can rearrange your snacks by dragging things around and you can also share your created News Snacks with your friends by using the 'share this page with your friends' link!

Here is how NewsSnacks is integrated into Spotback:
If a story that you are reading is tracked by Spotback databases, you will be able to rate it, save it and send it to friends just like with any other story in the personalized news section in Spotback.
Finally, Spotback NewsSnacks will also be available directly from http://newssnacks.com as of next week.

So, what is your favorite snack?

Spotback is getting better

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 05:28:09 -0800

We released a new version with cool new features. Here's a summary of the major new features in this release:

1. New opening screen: enter a few words that describe what you are interested in (or pick from the cloud) and you will instantly receive relevant stories.

2. News alerts by email: the personal tag tracker was upgraded and now includes email alerts and RSS updates.

3. Search results can be tracked via RSS.

4. Customize your own news page: full control over your news page, including drag-and-drop user interface and support for multiple page configurations with quick switch between configurations.

Read review on TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/28/spotback-startpage-gets-even-better

6 Web sites that make the net super-awesome

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:28:44 -0800

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!

Spotback reviewed on Silver Ronin

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 13:59:00 -0800

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!