Are you looking for a better way to sift through the overwhelming amount of news and information available online? Thoora wants to help! Thoora is a news aggregation site now in private beta. It launched yesterday at TechCrunch50 (you can read about the launch here.) I was quick enough to snag a private beta invite, so I thought I’d give you all a sneak peak at the service.
Thoora is different from other new aggregation sites because it uses a special algorithm to integrate the three major news online news sources: traditional news media sites, blogs and Twitter. The stories that are talked about and commented about the most rise to the top. You can also search for stories on specific topics using keywords.
Right now, Thoora really shines as a way to drill down and get more detail on a specific story. It catalogs both blog reactions and reactions from mainstream news sources, so you can see one story from many perspectives. The story selection is a good overview of what’s going on in the world, although it would be nice if you could personalize it. Personalization is supposed to be in the pipeline, but it isn’t available yet.
However, these guys really need to tweak their algorithm when it comes to measuring Twitter reaction to a specific story. Right now, Thoora is picking up loads of irrelevant tweets-in fact, in the screenshots above, I was exploring a story about Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoing a clean energy bill, and none of the tweets were relevant-they were all people talking about cleaning their houses or washing their faces to prevent blackheads (Twitter oversharing at its worst-Ewww!).
The Twitter issue will probably be a disappointment to a lot of people, especially with the current emphasis on using Twitter as a real-time news source. Hopefully that gets fixed soon. However, with a larger and more varied selection of headlines than Google News, Thoora is still a convenient way to get your news fix in the morning without having to visit a bunch of different sites.
What do you think about Thoora?
Our Rating of Thoora
Categories:web
[...] so it’s a good choice if you only want to see mainstream news articles. Personally, I prefer Thoora, which gives you a list of multiple related news stories and blogs for any given [...]