subscribeThoof is getting spammed big time
Thursday, June 28, 2007
I received an email today from thoof.com:
After only 12 days of beta testing and o few months of initial development personalized digg-like service thoof launched officially today. Michael Arrington reviewed thoof and argued with thoof founder about the usability and success of personalized news services.
I disagree with Mike about the usability of personalized services and I believe the main problem thoof has to face now is the digg-like way of submitting stories. This model is prone to spam attacks and digg has so far survived from it due to its large user base.
Logging in today with my beta account I was faced with this screen:
My thoof history only had an article about poverty in Africa and nothing else.
The site is obviously under heavy spam attack and this for me is one of the problems personalized services are supposed to solve. Unless they find some way to solve this problem now, it’s quite possible that the user base might never take off. In my opinion the digg model should be abandoned. An example of the same service but with predefined news sources is findory.com which handles spam quite successfully.
You can also read one of my older posts about why personalization can sometimes suck even with google’s and amazon’s services.
After 12 days in private invite-only testing, Thoof is now ready to
go public. Anyone can now go to http://thoof.com/ and use the site
without an invitation
After only 12 days of beta testing and o few months of initial development personalized digg-like service thoof launched officially today. Michael Arrington reviewed thoof and argued with thoof founder about the usability and success of personalized news services.
I disagree with Mike about the usability of personalized services and I believe the main problem thoof has to face now is the digg-like way of submitting stories. This model is prone to spam attacks and digg has so far survived from it due to its large user base.
Logging in today with my beta account I was faced with this screen:
My thoof history only had an article about poverty in Africa and nothing else.
The site is obviously under heavy spam attack and this for me is one of the problems personalized services are supposed to solve. Unless they find some way to solve this problem now, it’s quite possible that the user base might never take off. In my opinion the digg model should be abandoned. An example of the same service but with predefined news sources is findory.com which handles spam quite successfully.
You can also read one of my older posts about why personalization can sometimes suck even with google’s and amazon’s services.
Labels: personalization
2 Comments:
sanity, June 28, 2007 6:53 AM
That isn't spam, you've obviously switched off the adult filter in your preferences and so you are seeing adult-themed stories.
Well, actually I did not switch anything! I just signed in once during their beta period, I read one article. Then I logged in today. My history page still displayed the article I read the last time (something about poverty in Africa) and my personalized page was the one you see above.
To be honest I have no idea how good their personalization engine is. I didn’t get a chance to try it yet. My main objection with this service is having users submit stories. This is a fascinating way to discover news, but only if you have a large user base (like reddit.com, digg.com, etc).
My final 2 cents. I do believe these posts are spam, because many of those point to the same (spam) wordpress blogs. But the thing is, that even by scrolling down the page I only found 3 posts worth reading and many more spam-looking posts. After I read the good ones, I forced the page to reload to bring me new posts based on my short history, but nothing new came. So I presumed that there were no real articles in the site except from the spam ones. Time will tell.
To be honest I have no idea how good their personalization engine is. I didn’t get a chance to try it yet. My main objection with this service is having users submit stories. This is a fascinating way to discover news, but only if you have a large user base (like reddit.com, digg.com, etc).
My final 2 cents. I do believe these posts are spam, because many of those point to the same (spam) wordpress blogs. But the thing is, that even by scrolling down the page I only found 3 posts worth reading and many more spam-looking posts. After I read the good ones, I forced the page to reload to bring me new posts based on my short history, but nothing new came. So I presumed that there were no real articles in the site except from the spam ones. Time will tell.
