Thoof
August 12th 2007 21:03
One of the things I probably won’t be doing when I go back to NZ after my gap year or career break or sabbatical, or whatever you’d like to call it, is get more involved with social networking on the Net.
I don’t have any problem with people doing this, and I’m sure it’s of value for a lot of them, but what gets to me after a while is the fact that ninety-nine percent of the people doing it seem to be under thirty. And as all of us older people know, people under thirty don’t know everything, even though they think they do.
The latest example of a social network site that I’ve come across is Thoof. Thoof? Duth that mean that you’f no rooff to your mouff? I really don’t know where they came up with that name, but for me it doesn’t convey too much.
Thoof is a lot like Digg and all those other places where people (including me) put articles and notes that they think other people might like to see. And then people vote on them as to how interesting they are (a fairly subjective kind of voting, I suspect). Thoof says it has a system that keeps out the angry mob from determining relevance and controlling the distribution of news. This is where the ThoofRank comes in. ThoofRank is “fair measurement of how interesting a story is to readers with interests in common with the story. It is expressed as a percentage relative to other Thoof stories, so a ThoofRank above 50% indicates that a story is of above average interest to those readers. When a story has just been submitted it will start out with a low ThoofRank, but this will increase as more people see it.”
Thoof also has a personalization algorithm that’s determined by the user’s interests, and which will then offer that user personalized news. I haven’t been able to check this out yet, not having joined up with Thoof at this point, but obviously in order to comment accurately on it I need to!
I don’t have any problem with people doing this, and I’m sure it’s of value for a lot of them, but what gets to me after a while is the fact that ninety-nine percent of the people doing it seem to be under thirty. And as all of us older people know, people under thirty don’t know everything, even though they think they do.
The latest example of a social network site that I’ve come across is Thoof. Thoof? Duth that mean that you’f no rooff to your mouff? I really don’t know where they came up with that name, but for me it doesn’t convey too much.
Thoof is a lot like Digg and all those other places where people (including me) put articles and notes that they think other people might like to see. And then people vote on them as to how interesting they are (a fairly subjective kind of voting, I suspect). Thoof says it has a system that keeps out the angry mob from determining relevance and controlling the distribution of news. This is where the ThoofRank comes in. ThoofRank is “fair measurement of how interesting a story is to readers with interests in common with the story. It is expressed as a percentage relative to other Thoof stories, so a ThoofRank above 50% indicates that a story is of above average interest to those readers. When a story has just been submitted it will start out with a low ThoofRank, but this will increase as more people see it.”
Thoof also has a personalization algorithm that’s determined by the user’s interests, and which will then offer that user personalized news. I haven’t been able to check this out yet, not having joined up with Thoof at this point, but obviously in order to comment accurately on it I need to!
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