The Guardian posts a review of TailRank (if not a little negative but hey, constructive criticism is a good thing right?). I should also note that TailRank is still in beta!
After Digg and Reddit, there’s TailRank (tailrank.com), a “social news recommendation system and collaborative filter”. What makes it unlike the other news recommendation systems is that it considers what links are being used, provides custom news by letting each user share the news and blogs they find interesting, and then recommends other items.
TailRank did a bad job handling his OPML feed (which I’m still working on).
He also takes issue with my use of funny messages on the site:
The site does have a potentially serious case of the cutes: “Please give a donation to TailRank so we can keep feeding Santa’s little elves which we use to index the blogosphere,” says a banner. Please, TailRank, can’t you ask for a donation like an adult?
Hey. I love that! I hate it when websites are too serious. Maybe it’s just me but I’ve had a lot of people appreciate the fact that TailRank doesn’t have terse error messages. The donation message was specifically chosen to be cute so that people would get a little laugh and hopefully that would get them to donate.
When I visited earlier this week, the top “post” was an MSNBC item about Google’s Ten Golden Rules of staff retention - a piece of news I thought was old a fortnight ago.
Yes. You’re spot on about this one. Funny Charles noticed this as this was a random bug that popped up (though I should have fixed it).
Hopefully in another week or so I’ll have these all worked out and Charles will give it another shot. We’re fast approaching TailRank 1.0. Start holding your breath!
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December 23, 2005 at 8:51 am
You took the criticism in stride. Way to go.
December 23, 2005 at 9:16 am
I love cute messages! I’ve noticed them in Flickr and Yahoo’s Widget Engine installer. It makes it more human, since you know that someone back there wrote it.
December 23, 2005 at 4:49 pm
I was at the stoplight the other day and there was a guy with his little cardboard sign. Not an uncommon sight here in Austin. I usually don’t fork over money to these guys, but, in this case I did. Here’s why: as the guy was walking towards me I noticed that his sign read “need a Taco” and as he got closer to me he flipped the sign around and it read “need a beer”. It made me laugh so, I gave him a buck. The moral of this story is that I, like most people are more likely to donate if the solicitation is humorous. Keep up the good work with TailRank.