Thoof- Pops questions to improve recommendation

By Vivek | August 31st, 2007 at 01:51 pm ET         

Thoof, the news reading and recommendation site launched earlier this year, is hooked to Flickr’s new app release per week process for real. New small but smart thingy from Thoof - questions. Once in a while(1 in 20 stories), Thoof will pop a question at you. When you answer the question, you will be shown a nice pie chart showing how other people responded to the question.

The feature doesn’t end there. Thoof in turn uses these answers to improve its story recommendations, “based on which stories other users that answered the question liked”. Interesting idea around likeness.

Besides this, since it’s launch the site has added ThoofRank that indicates the percentage of Thoof stories a story is better than the one you are reading, ”Thoof it” button for browsers, ability to search by source or submitter, varied coloring according to read/unread status(stories seen but not read read - green, stories completely new - blue, and stories read - gray), and like always Tag streams.

For those not following the startup, earlier this year Austin, Texas based Thoof had raised $1m in seed funding from Austin Ventures and Ron Conway.