Persai launches, now called Pressflip | Hacker News Reader

Persai launches, now called Pressflip

teddziuba.com

14 pointswhalesalad18 comments

When I pressed "flip" to signify that I did not like the content, it bought me to a login box. I have decided that the content they gave me is not useful, and their response is to ask me to create an account with them?

This is the point where Uncov would have posted a 'FAIL' picture.

And how would you handle personalization without an account?

Cookies identify computers, which is close enough to identifying people to work in the short term.

We usually advise startups never to make people create accounts if they can avoid it. Let new visitors do as much as they can without registering, but give them the option of creating an account if they want to save whatever state they've accumulated.

Cookies are ephemeral and people get pissed off if you set them to expire 14 years from now, for example. What these guys are doing is probably classifying data with SVMs (or something like that) and that takes time. From brief testing, their updates are not realtime. So I think having an account to personalize in this case isn't such a bad thing. You can search as much as you want but when it comes time to personalization, account is not a bad thing.

But in any case, I don't see how this product is better than Google News, for example.

"people get pissed off"

most people don't know what cookies are.

Same experience. Upon which, I left the site.

Don't show me the flip button unless I can use it.

Also, I didn't know the buttom was a kill switch. I thought it was a vote IN FAVOR of the search result, like a Digg or something.

True - I did not realize that the flip icon was a kill. Plus there's no easy way to undo the flip.

Forget Pressflip, I want Uncov back!

"... Forget Pressflip, I want Uncov back! ..."

Got that covered with a new column at "The Register". You got to read a bit harder... it's to the RHS of the article near the about box ~ http://teddziuba.com/2008/07/announcing-my-new-column-at-th....

I know but that's like a castrated Uncov...

I don't like the new name, 'pressflip' makes it sound like it's focussed on newspapers. Presumably the idea is that you 'press' on things you like and 'flip' things you don't, but then shouldn't it be 'clickflip'?

Also, if anyone actually got around to creating an account, what do you think about the Google-style settings/signout thing in the top right-hand corner of the screen?

It seems to work well enough. I put in topics, it spits out stories. I "flip" articles, they go away, hopefully some robot takes notice and makes the next set better.

But I can't help wonder what the bigger plan is for this service. It doesn't seem that a not-really-targeted but maybe-smart news recommendation system will fly -- who's the market?

i guess the opposite of the 'aha' moment is a 'ha?!' moment

I think I'd sound more like a "huh!?" moment. Close though.

Being asked what I'm interested in was a surprisingly novel moment. The economics of attention are favoring "pushed" information, which I hadn't consciously noticed until now.

I actually kinda liked it. The UI needs work, but otherwise it's way better than half the crap out their.

it sucks and how Uncov was stupid

Wait, is this real?

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