tiinker blog

We have finally begun promoting tiinker to the “general public”, although we are still keeping it as a private beta for a short while so that we have some control over the number of users (to forestall any problems that may be caused by the user base growing unexpectedly fast).

In addition to the basic challenge of actually getting the word out, we also need to make sure that we get the right word out about what tiinker actually does. tiinker is not intended as primarily an RSS reader (although it does that just fine). It is an intelligent, personalised news aggregator. We are aiming tiinker at people who don’t necessarily know what an RSS feed is; users who just want to read news and explore beyond their local paper, but who do not want to spend time filtering out stories which do not interest them.

This is a bit of a catch for us. Many potential early adopters, who are already advanced enough to use feed readers and the like, may initially be unimpressed by tiinker as a pure feed reader. Subscribing to feeds is not core functionality for many of our users; we haven’t focused on the reader, in favour of optimising our site for non power-users. To keep it simple, the reader lacks some of the bells and whistles attached to dedicated feed readers like Google’s. It’s simple, functional, but not a bounty of features.

An additional challenge (which we knew was coming) will be keeping new users interested long enough for them to appreciate the advantages of personalised news. At the beginning, when we knew most of our users personally, we could count on them visiting the site a couple of times, giving the underlying AI time to adapt to their interests. However, we can’t count on that for most Internet users. People are far less likely to come back a second time if the personalisation does not adapt quickly enough, so we’re working now on getting that initial “wow” factor up as high as we can.

These challenges are not new in the land of web startups. Getting users and keeping them isn’t an original problem, but one we must now face :-).