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Some guesses: One reason might be that the existing range of news portals is good enough for most people to get approximately personalized content. People can find one or more news outlets, aggregators, or blogs that more or less reflect their interests, whether it's HN, Reddit/Subreddits, Slashdot, CNN, Fox News, DailyKos, Lambda the Ultimate, or whatever, and they just read those, supplemented with links passed on from their friends via Twitter/Facebook/etc. So your market is the people who can't find any combination of those that works for them, which maybe isn't a ton. A different reason might be that Google News does personalization (via the "Recommended" box), and so already captures a decent part of the market for news personalization, at least in the newspaper-articles sense. A third might be that it's hard to do well. To really catch on, people need to rarely get articles they don't care about, and often have this feeling of, "yes! this is exactly the kind of news I want to read, and which I wouldn't have found otherwise". That's probably hard to do! The Google News recommendations don't really blow me away, for example, even though I've been using it long enough that it should have decent data by now. |