Prismatic Hopes to Create a New Category of Social News | Hacker News Reader

Prismatic Hopes to Create a New Category of Social News

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83 pointsbrendannee34 comments

As a recent daily user, prismatic is awesome.

The way they leverage twitter is pretty interesting, mixing in "endorsements" to articles from both people close to you, famous people, and random people, in a way that keeps it interesting.

There's also fairly heavy machine learning going on behind the scenes, in a way that is non intrusive. Congratulations to those guys.

Agreed, I think it's the first effort at article recommendations that's really worked for me. I think it's due to a pretty clever combination of social signal and machine learning.

Thanks Toby, really glad you've enjoyed it. We can get so much better, but at least we finally do have a foundation. :)

Thanks, Alex. What do you mean about the non intrusive point - something about the ongoing interactions within the product or things like bootstrapping interests from twitter?

By non-intrusive I meant that I have no idea what kind of ML is really going on behind the scenes. In this sense it's very different from interacting with, say, Netflix's recommender, or youtube's ad predictor (a friend "liked" a vodka ad once and is now assumed to be an alcoholic), where you really do need to build a mental model of what the ML is doing to effectively use the site. With prismatic I don't seem to need to care.

The only thing about it that I really dislike is that there's no option to delete or cancel your account (a trend with startups). I don't fall to the silly excuse that it's in beta or that they'll have such options "soon". This should be there since day 1. Shows respect for the user/tester and sends the message that your information/data is yours to keep/remove whenever you want.

Keep in mind that this is not a criticism towards Prismatic (which is really cool and well done), I just used them as an example to a common startup practice.

I agree, and we're on it. We're only just now allowing more people into the product and it's still a long way from being openly available publicly.

With young companies and products, it's tough to balance all the constraints with the goals. We've spent a lot of time to learn what our users really love about the product. We agree that we need to get a profile out very soon, but we're happy we've put the core of the product first from the beginning.

Yay, go Clojure! Hopefully we can get video from Bradford Cross's keynote from Clojure/West up on the web soon.

The first 10 people to email hackernews@getprismatic.com with their twitter handle will get an immediate invite to our early access.

Edit: gone -- but if you sign up at getprismatic.com you should get an invite soon.

This is so great, thank you so much! :)

Prismatic is what I read in the morning when I'm waking up and drinking a cup of coffee. I think it has the potential to change the way we consume not just social news, but news in general.

I love prismatic - its completely replaced Google reader for me. I find that it consistently shows articles that are really relevant to me, from sources I've never even considered. Often, I'll find highly relevant things on prismatic a few hours before a friend emails me the same article that they found through some other source.

I suppose it's up to me to be the "Debbie Downer" on this one.

First off, I like the recommendations, and the learning algorithm seems decent. However the UI continues to give me nightmares. I setup a list similar to what I have in Zite or Flipboard. For some reason only Chrome will let me actually go to the list and scroll it. For everything else (IE, Firefox, Opera) I can see the list, I can click on the list, but I can't scroll the list.

While I like the recommendations, I would also like the ability to have more control over sources, and to control the refresh rate. Yes I "get" they think that isn't needed if they are doing this right. I just respectfully disagree.

Just my .02 worth. I wish the team well, and hope they have an Android App version of this eventually as I would love to have the pretty on my Sony Tablet S...

Hey Edwin,

We agree and we're actively working on all the issues you bring up. Stick with us, it's really a big endeavor and it will improve quickly.

Signed up last time this popped up but didn't jump in (bad timing).. Just kicking the tiers, the suggestions are really hitting the right spot. Just a suggestion - I'd really like another button - read - with an action like the "dont like" button, so I cam just sit there clicking next next next without scrolling down (that said, the vim keys to jump between stories is awesome!!)

I use Prismatic daily. It does an amazing job of crawling the web and curating news articles that are aligned with my interest. Many of these articles I would normally not see and have no idea that they even exist. Prismatic is my primary method of news consumption now. There is a feeling of serendipitous discovery every time I use it, which keeps the delight factor high!

Wow, these are some rave reviews! Email me and I might give you an immediate invite (have two)!

Two to give away as well. Prismatic is excellent.

siong1987 [at] gmail dot com

thanks.

It looks like I need your twitter names as well. My email is in my profile if you don't want to post them.

You have to put your email in your description, the one you put in your profile is not public.

edit: i have mine in my profile, I would appreciate an invite!

I'd love one! My email is "bradsimantel@gmail.com".

Congrats to Aria and Bradford. Knowing Aria and his work, I have little doubt there is some fantastic engineering under the hood at Prismatic.

Any way to sign up without using a Twitter account? Or is the service so tightly integrated with Twitter that it would be pointless to do so?

I actively use it for last 3-4 months and it's definitely my nr1 tool to receive news!!

give me a heads up on twitter if you need an invite @zappika ;)

Prismatic feels simply magical when you use it.

I've been using Prismatic for a month or two and really like it--it brings up interesting and relevant stories every time.

Hey Bradford, congrats on launching!

Before you sign up, Twitter asks you to give Prismatic permission to "Post tweets for me", why?

We only use that permission to allow you to share stories you find with Prismatic. We'll never tweet unless you ask us to.

I finally got FB since that's where the party is, but I'm not over 45. Why should I get twitter?

Any invites or such for HNers?

Tweet at me (atpassos_ml) and I can spend one of my three invites on you.

Prismatic is the next Google.

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