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I am writing this post while re-watching Bill Gate’s CES keynote, let me say sorry if advance it’s a bit disjointed. I actually skipped the keynote on Sunday because I did not want to deal with the crowds, and I watched most of it after it was posted but I did not get to pay as much attention as I wanted, so I guess two half-hearted attempts are just as good as paying attention once.

I’ve exchanged an email or two with someone from Spotback, apparently they saw my previous post and wanted to hear my thoughts. Since I like what their doing I am more than happy to weigh in.There are a few things I really like about the site- like that you can have full functionality without signing up and I think the little rating widget is cool (though I could see it as getting annoying over time). When you rate something above 0 (1-5) you automatically get another story in that category. This is cool at first, but actually ends up being quite random because it seems that the new story is only related to the first by the category. So when I rate up “AMD shares slump after sales forecast cut” a General Business story I get “Phone’s Biggest Weakness: It’s a Closed Sandbox” another General Business story. When I rate up a Telecom story in the Business section I get another Telecom story.

This is pretty useful in theory, but like most people my daily reading is not about learning a lot about a broad category- it’s not like I am doing general research on a filed- I am coming to the site because I want to know what important happened today. By opening up a new story related by section and category only the site fosters learning about the events of one field, not more about the specific article/event, as it should. This is to say that I would like the spotback widget to open up another article which has more to do with the original one, basically because I want to read another article about the same thing, in this case AMD’s stock.

Spotback allows for general reading of important news with their customizable front page in which you pick what categories you would like news from. This is much like Google News but I don’t yet know how stories are chosen to appear by default because there is no clear system of editors/Diggers/etc. doing the choosing, rather it is something automated behing the scenes. Also, I don’t know how my ratings on the Spotback widget affect other users and what they read. This ultimate is going to decide how social of a news service Spotback is, not that is needs to be social to be good.

As for that Spotback rating widget, it still needs some work. If I rate a story down, there is no useful reaction on the site- it does not disappear or fade, its background just turns gold. If I rate something up then I get a new story. What is strange is that there seems to be no difference between rating something as a 1 or a 5 because the reaction is the same. So why not just do a thumbs up/thumbs down? I am guessing the rates mean something else that I am not seeing, supposedly it affects my personal algorithm, but I don’t see that actually making an effect so far. Maybe over long term use it will be more clear, but for now it seems like the ratings has no effect on the news I see. The widget can be reset over and over so if I rate something a 1 and then a 4 I will get two new stories. If I rate a story a -4 and then a -1 I will not get a new story, but if I move that -1 to a 3 I will get one. Oddly, if I rate a story a 5 and then downgrade it to a 3, I will get a new story, so it clearly needs some more fine-tuning.

Something annoying I noticed a few times were items placed in the wrong category. For example “Whale shark’s death a second blow to aquarium” from CNN.com was placed in the Space section of the Science category. This did not happen very often but it does sort of defeat the purpose of customizable categories.

One feature I really liked was that the blurbs include images related to the story. When an image is clicked a new window appears (not a browser window, just a viewable pane above the site) and you can read the full contents. The “full contents” is really the full contents of the RSS feed so it is not necessarily the full story, but sometimes it is, and it is almost always enough to let you figure out if you want to read the entire article or not.

When you are done reading the first page you can click “More Stories” and go on to another random smattering or stories from your chosen categories. If you want to read less you can drop sections from the 15 categories or you can choose not to read an entire section at all. Users are also able to block stories, which deletes them from the current page and block future articles from that web site.

The final important thing about Spotback are the snacks and personalized alerts. Using Snacks you can either create your own page using RSS/OPML or view a set of predetermined popular RSS feeds (just like PopURLS.com or something along those lines). With the alerts you can get news straight to your email right after its published or in daily, twice daily, or weekly roundups.

All told I like where Spotback is going with there service but I am not that impressed just yet. In theory this could be a great service for someone who wants to keep up on a few broad categories of news and is not picky about how the news gets to them- they don’t mind that it is an algorithim they might have effected in some way, as opposed to an editor, a large group of voters, or something like more transparent. Personally I am not sure I trust myself to choose what is important and would rather go with a service that I have found to be reliable, like Techmeme, or a professional and well-trained editor, as found on NYtimes.com. I appreciate that Spotback is getting away from group-think news and allows personalization, but I still think it has a way to go before it pulls people away from Techmeme/Memeorandum, Rojo, or Newsvine.

Further reading: Techcrunch, Ajaxian, Mashable, Web2.0List

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