5 Bridge

Here is a new concept in social bookmarking and networking. Essentially Thoof is a personalized news service than learns about what you like and dislike as you use the sight more and more.

This idea of matching your preferences and surfing history to predict what you will enjoy reading is brilliant. And works great. You can also add to the content on the site, which gives us the user a real sense of ownership about what is being published. To be honest I am still not 100% on how this works, but you can select “edit” on a page on the site, and change around the description of the entry.. in the faq it says it is a little like wiki in that way.. what I am interested in is how quickly the moderators (editors?) respond if the editing is purely spammy or malicious in nature.

Thoof is obviously driving some buzz and interest with their site if their alexa ranking is anything to go by.. they must be getting a fair bit of traffic.

One of the main claims and potential advantages of thoof over rivals such as digg, is that they have the potential to overcome the phenomena of the “angry mob” driving content and what is popular, and therefore showing up on people’s front pages. Thoof, guides the most relevant content as it matches the individual web surfer’s preferences and viewing history.. so that what you see is guided by you.. not, for example, and angry mob.

It is still very early days, I for one am very interested to see whether thoof can consolidate the strong launch phase interest many bloggers, news savvy and other interested individuals have had in the site so far.. it is certainly a brilliant idea.. well executed and coded.. with a little marketing help.. but, how successfully Thoof builds a community will determine ultimately, how successful this new style of social media, crossed with a wiki ends up being.

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