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"I have to admit I'm somewhat skeptical about RSS readers that \"adapt to my reading habits\" and serve me the \"stories I like\". The reason is simple: I've tried out many (some similar services are now defunct Findory and Spotback), and none have ever worked out that well for me. It's probably the nature of my job: I need to follow all tech stories anyway; it would be very hard even for a human editor to create a subset which would include only the stories I need and leave out only the unimportant ones. \nEnter Tiinker (second choice domain name, I reckon), an RSS reader and recommendation engine in which you can vote stories up and down, while Tiinker will try to learn from your preferences and - in theory - eventually show only the stories you want to read. \nLet's leave that bit aside for a second, and focus on the other stuff Tiinker offers. Immediately upon logging in, I feel crippled by the lack of options. I can't rearrange feeds in the way I like; I cannot make individual items bigger or smaller; I can't read only the titles; I can't choose to fit more or less feeds on a page, etc. In short, I can't do 90% of the things I can do with Google Reader, Netvibes or Bloglines, and this is an immediate deal breaker for me. \nWhat can I do? Well, I can add stories to my scrapbook, I can add my own feeds or an OPML file...and that's about it. I know Tiinker is in private beta stage, but this simply isn't enough. People who are serious about their feeds want more options, period. \nGetting back to the \"learning\" part, I guess it takes time, but after a while I'm not noticing any revolutionary changes. I've voted some stories up and some down, and while Tiinker has adapted to some degree, I still don't feel like I'm getting the stories I need. Perhaps this is partly due to the lack of configuration options, so I can't organize my feeds in any meaningful manner, but Tiinker seems useful only for casual reading, in the oh-let's-see-what's-cool-today sense. For me, it's just a random, poorly organized bunch of feeds. \nThe fact is, in order to have a chance of succeeding, Tiinker needs to have most of the major options that the competition already has - and then slap their AI recommendation engine on top of that. It's not likely to gain many converts as it is. \n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/11/11/tiinker-recommendation-organization/>