There are a number of social news sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and many others that all leverage social recommendations to power discovery. Tiinker is a social news startup based in Australia that recently launched into private beta that leverages both active and passive user inputs to determine what content should be displayed on the site.
Tiinker delivers content in a clean modular layout and offers users to page between a number of topics and categories. Users can actively thumbs up or thumbs down items and Tiinker learns that what you like in an effort to craft the perfect page of content. Users can toggle between six tabs which include your articles, popular articles, your subscriptions, search, your history and scrapbook. The subscriptions tab enables users to pull in a reading list or OPML file or add feeds individually and acts a simple feed reader. Items that are imported appear to be matriculated into other areas on the site. Tiinker allows users to view site activity history and the scrapbook tab offers a place to save items for later.
Tiinker is taking on personalized news and in my short time testing it seemed to deliver interesting content. However, it seemed a little slow on reacting to my active inputs. For example, on the sports page I reacted positively to "baseball" articles but in coming back to Tiinker I still did not see a slew of "baseball" articles in the sports section. Time will tell if what Tiinker is calling "artificial intelligence" is smart enough to crack the difficult problem of personalized recommendations and know what I want to see, when I want to see it.
