Thoora is Your Robot Buddy for Exploring Web Topics by Jon Mitchell. (on ReadWriteWeb)
From the post:
With a Web full of stuff, discovery is a hard problem. Search engines were the first tools on the scene, but their rankings still have a hard time identifying relevance the same way a human user would. These days, social networks are the substitute for content discovery, and even the major search engines are using your social signals to determine what’s relevant for you. But the obvious problem with social search is that if your friends haven’t discovered it yet, it’s not on your radar.
At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.
Create topic, Thoora suggests keywords, choose some, can declare them to be equivalent, results shared with others by default.
Users who create “good” topics can develop followings.
Although topics can be shared, the article does not mention sharing keywords.
Seems like a missed opportunity to crowd-source keywords from multiple “good” authors on the same topic to improve the results. That is you supply five or six keywords for topic A and I come along and suggest some additional keywords for topic A, perhaps from a topic I already have. Would require “acceptance” by the first user but that should not be hard.
I was amused to read in the Thoora FAQ:
Finally, Google News has no social component. Thoora was created so that topics could be shared and followed, because your topics – once painted with your expert brush – are super-valuable to others and ripe for sharing.
Sharing keywords is far more powerful that sharing topics. We have all had the experience of searching for something and a companion suggests a different word and we find the object of our search. Sharing in Thoora now is like following tweets. Useful, but not all that it could be.
If you decide to use Thoora, would appreciate your views and comments.