[declan]

Thanks for your interest! Prismatic made a beautiful app but took a very different approach toward recommendation. They tried to build, as I understand it, their own social commenting layer on top of news--an effective competitor to Twitter and Facebook--and encouraged linking with social networks. We experimented with the latter in an early version of Recent News but discarded it in favor of a user-focused approach that doesn't require social linking (and isn't as prone to bad recommendations if your friends' interests are different from yours).

In any case Prismatic is no longer updating or supporting its iOS and Android apps. Techcrunch reported in July that Prismatic pivoted to B2B and is trying to make money like Dataminr by selling access to its APIs.

[ducuboy]

Thank you for the insight!

I'm very interested because (as I mentioned several times here already so sorry for the plug again) I'm building http://svven.com. It's also about recommendation but instead of AI I'm betting on the intelligence of the people - a social approach to relevance.

I will sure try Recent News to compare the results.

[declan]

Thanks! Good luck with Svven. It's an interesting approach and different than the path we've taken with Recent News.

I just went to the site and was about to try it but saw Svven wanted permission to: "Post Tweets for you."

Is it possible to use Svven without granting you permission to post on my Twitter timeline? I have a policy of not granting apps or services such permission, so I stopped without testing it. :(

If there's a way to tweak the permissions I'll give it a shot!

[ducuboy]

Oh yes sure, Svven doesn't post tweets for you or anything like that.

Thanks for pointing this out, I'm thinking about changing the Twitter app settings to read-only. All it does is parse your home timeline to get the tweets so read-only is enough for Svven.