tiinker blog

We’re sorry to announce that tiinker will be shutting down in the next few days.

It’s been great fun and we’ve learnt a heap, but it seems that there just isn’t space for a personalising news aggregator to grow large. We still think personalisation is the future, but the eventually successful implementation will probably be at the news sources, the online faces of the newspapers and media companies, or possibly a large content aggregator. The power of the news brands is strong, with good reason. Future combinations of trusted editorial with intelligent personalisation will provide a very compelling source of information, but for now the traditional media seem reluctant to pursue this approach.

Thanks to all our users for joining us thus far.

The tiinker team.

We’re back online. Flexiscale eventually recovered our server, but we took the opportunity to move tiinker to Slicehost, something we were mere days away from doing anyway. We’ve recently re-implemented tiinker’s data storage with an object database, rather than the traditional relational database. The move was a bit of a rush so we haven’t finished performance tuning yet, but already tiinker is more responsive.

We’ve learnt a lesson with tiinker’s various hosting infrastructures. When moving to Flexiscale we thought the ability to switch instances on and off on demand (and not pay for switched-off instances) would be really useful, but we far overestimated how much we’d be doing that. tiinker experiences a fairly stable load so there’s no need for quick scaling with demand. In particular, there’s no call for scaling back down. We now prepay slicehost monthly, but similar hardware is about half the cost, more than offsetting any amount we could have saved by switching off Flexiscale instances in quiet periods.

Our apologies that tiinker has recently been unavailable. We’re having trouble with our hosting provider and a timezone difference plus the weekend is making resolution a slow process.

We’ll update here when tiinker is back online.