Less is more
December 8, 2007
We made a tough decision over the past couple of days: we removed a feature from tiinker, discarding weeks of effort and perhaps making tiinker a mite less useful for some users.
It’s for the better, though. We removed the subscribed sources feature, also known as the feed reader. Up until now, tiinker was a hybrid of two applications: a personalised, learning news aggregator and a feed reader. It wasn’t the best feed reader in the world (although we think it is the world’s best personalised news), and it was a feature that only a small fraction of our regular beta users had ever used. It also led to some confusion over what tiinker was trying to achieve, and was causing a couple of technical headaches.
It probably shouldn’t have been there to start with. We initially thought a feed reader would be a great power-user tool, making tiinker better for technically sophisticated users. But our main audience aren’t power users; tiinker is personalised news for everyone, and we’re proud that you don’t have to know a thing about RSS (a standard for publishing streams of content) to use it. Sophisticated users instead use tiinker for their initial news hit, getting lots of interesting stories quickly, but then visit an existing feed reader (like Google’s or Bloglines) for watching particular sources.
So the feed reader is gone, although it will be back, much improved, sometime in the future. This change allows us to focus on the essence of tiinker — the news personalisation that is its core value — in preparation for public release. There’s a lesson in here too, one that’s been espoused many times before: do the simplest, smallest thing that will work first, and add features if required later.
Balance is key
December 5, 2007
An interesting issue that’s comes up in designing a system that learns which articles a user likes, and then presents those articles, is how to order them. For example, we could order the articles purely by how much we think you will like each article. But this means that you would see a large chunk of your most favourite topic area in a contiguous block, followed by a chunk of your next most favourite, and so on. It’s quite boring for me to get three pages of stories all about, say, motorsport. A selection of stories on different (but interesting) topics is far more engaging. We try to balance the stories presented to you as much as possible while still presenting high quality articles, which poses somewhat of a trade-off. The algorithms by which tiinker orders articles that are presented to you have been by far the most re-evaluated and re-written parts of our code.
Lately we have been experimenting with various ways of doing this, so you may notice a wider selection of articles coming up than you’re used to. We welcome comments regarding this, and any other aspect of our system. We’re constantly trying to find a balance between presenting a wide variety of articles and providing high quality articles and, of course, learning what balance suits you.
