It's taken more than a year, two rounds of angel financing, and a whole lot of butt pain, but the startup I've been working on is finally ready to go.This is a maliciously unofficial announcement.
What Does It Do?
You would like to know that, wouldn't you? Well let me tell you, it's the greatest web service product that has ever been created. This product is so awesome, that simply reading this announcement will make you several times cooler.
Pressflip is a persistent search service, but it's not like the others. It doesn't think it knows better than you. Previously, search & learning systems have been black boxes. You go to the site, click a few stories from unrelated topics, and it will show you content that it thinks you'll like, most of the time based on the click patterns of other users, the theory being that if another user reads the same programming articles I do, then he likely has the same political opinions, taste in humor, and favorite sports teams as me. Right. Makes perfect sense.
For what it's worth, Digg's up-and-coming recommendation system solves this problem by correlating users within a defined set of topics, so people are catching on that there's a shit-ton of variance in this kind of social-click correlation.
Anyway, pressflip is way different and way more specific. We don't have a define set of topics, you tell us the topics. We don't correlate you with other users, our computer programs read what you click on, figure out what it's about, and then show you more stuff like it. If you don't like something, you press "flip", and we'll show you less like it.
How Does It Work?
That's a good question. After dealing with angel investors, VCs, users, and anybody who isn't an engineer, the answer in my mind is, nobody gives a shit. Really, nobody cares about your algorithm or how revolutionary you think it is. All people care about is a system that shows them things they want to read.
With that in mind, we set off to answer one question: what are you interested in? Corollary to this, we have declared the you-can't-end-a-sentence-in-a-preposition rule to be obsolete, because it's stupid.
You can type something in as a response to that, "new york yankees", "iphone 3g", "john mccain", and we'll start by showing you some news about the topic. You can save this search as an interest and continue to get news about it. As you click and flip stories within the interest, the machine will learn the nuanced detail about what you like. Maybe you only like iPhone 3G news that talks about how the AT&T data plan is giving people the shaft. We can learn that.
tl;dr
Go to pressflip.com and start using my shit. Then blog about how much you think it sucks and how Uncov was stupid.
I lurk #uncov on Freenode as tjd.
