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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.

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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.

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. :)

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