Geelong, Australia based Tinfinger has launched in beta today with a user-generated “omnibus” of famous and well known people. The site combines user-authored encyclopedic profile pages of famous people, some social networking aspects, a revenue share model and aggregated news. People in Tinfinger’s database are sorted via a top-down category structure and a flat tag structure with tags “being expressible as RDF triples (subject-predicate-object, as opposed to subject-object).” Wikipedia style the service offers stubs of 150 words on celebrities who do not yet have a full profile on the site, that can be edited and added to by TinFinger users. Tinfinger’s “clustered news aggregation” offers “front pages” for 650 categories in a similar fashion to Google News but notably with data pulled by its own news and blog search engine. Tinfinger does not use links or semantic connections to cluster; just names, using a publicly available algorithm called tinscore. On the social networking side, Tinfinger is using tech from PeopleAggregator to allow user interaction including groups for each category or user generated groups. I spoke to Tinfinger CEO Paul Montgomery prior to launch; the site has taken over two years to get to this stage and aside from the social networking side it’s exclusively powered by their own code and engine. It’s a tough market, particularly with Google set to launch Knol later this year but Montgomery argues that the strength of Tinfinger is its narrow focus and says that Tinfinger will be to Who’s Who what Wikipedia was to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Any user generated content site is only as good as the contributions made by users, however the transparent revenue sharing model combined with a focus on a hot vertical (celebrities) may tide it well going forward, particularly in tapping into the celebrity obsessed mainstream. → Read More
I’ve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo. The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what’s hot at any given time by analyzing who’s linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users. It’s not easy to define this space. In general, I think the services that are focusing mostly on blog links are turning up the best stuff. Many of the services that Paul Montgomery listed in a post earlier this week don’t do this…they rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance. My list is below. These sites either use incoming links or story clusters (or both) to determine relevance, and show the linking/discussing blogs. I have written about many of these separately already. The others I will write about in the future if their features are or become interesting. The List: Blogniscient Blogrunner Blogsnow Chuquet Megite Memeorandum Newroo (pre-launch) Tailrank Technorati Kitchen Tinfinger (pre-launch) Topix.net TruthLaidBear The best? Still Memeorandum, but I love the experiments being tried by other services. And something else: these services are going to start getting acquired by the big guys, if only for the brilliance of the engineering work behind the engines. Update: And for more on Memeorandum and this space, listen to yesterday’s Gillmor Gang, which had a guest appearance by Gabe. → Read More
