Another Pointless Blog

This week I’ve been trying out a website called Tiinker. Tiinker is a product of Deep Grey Labs which is a start up in Australia. Their website has a great theory behind it, and I’m sure that it would be useful to many people - I’ve even gotten lots of use out of it! So what is Tiinker? Well, it is a news article site that finds the articles that YOU want, unlike Digg which assumes what the COMMUNITY wants. This is an ingenious idea - I’m not a fan of finding articles that the COMMUNITY likes, but I don’t like (Especially all those US tech related ones ).

To start using this awesome site just head over to Tiinker.com and sign up for an account - it’s quick and easy. The coding in Tiinker is great, going between pages takes almost no time to load, and searching articles in their database takes next to no time at all. Once you log in to Tiinker and play around with it for a bit, you should get to a ‘home page’ like this (click the thumbnail to enlarge). As you can see, it is quite simple. Up the top you can change your settings (including country - Tiinker can search articles specifically from your country too!). In the tabs, you can unleash the winning power of Tiinker. The ‘My Articles’ tab is where you can start going through articles specific to their category. For instance, I usually go through the technology category to find stories I like, then when you  find a story that you find interesting, bad or something you want to keep you use these 3 buttons (), which are the ‘controls’ of finding the articles that you like - letting Tiinker learn what you love. The “Thumbs Up” button means that you like that article, as you can see, I’ve already marked that article as a “Thumbs Up”. The ‘Thumbs Down” button does exactly the opposite - it hides these articles that you don’t like. With these 2 buttons you can control what articles are shown to you in future searches. The last button puts articles in your ‘Scrapbook’, which I will describe later. The next tab is ‘Popular’; this is when Tiinker brings a little bit of Digg theory in. It shows you the articles which are popular to the community so you can see and rate the popular articles too! ‘Search’ enables you to search the whole database for articles relating to specific keywords, and is useful for finding different perspectives on the same news story. The second last tab is ‘History’ - this section shows you articles you have recently rated or viewed. You can change ratings from recent articles in here, if you would like. The last tab is ‘Scrapbook’, and this is where you can save articles that you find interesting and would like to come back to. For instance, Macworld ‘08 (including the Apple Air) is on everyones minds at this moment and I’m thinking about writing a blog post on it, so I searched for articles and this is what I got, and will refer to when writing it.

As you can see, Tiinker is fantastic! You can easily search news articles, and it learns what you like to read and filters out the content you find boring or annoying - providing a more ‘personal’ approach. I would highly recommend this website to anyone who reads the news on a regular basis or even the person that only likes ‘tech’ news. The intelligent filtering systems alters to your needs and thats what makes this service the perfect solution for any person at all.

Thanks for reading
Matt.

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