| Seed, 6/07 Austin Ventures Ron Conway | $1M |
Thoof is a late entry to the personalized/social news arena. As many Digg clones and alternative models are failing or have failed to take hold of a substantial user base, Thoof brings a slightly new take on getting your daily stories which it hopes will attract more than a niche audience. Thoof is an automated news recommender of sorts. It works similarly to many music recommendation engines such as Last.fm and Pandora, by displaying articles you might like based upon your past reading history. Readers submit articles in a Digg-like fashion, but don’t vote to get the articles on the front page. Founder Ian Clarke, formerly of video site Revver, claims that with video as well as news, many people may read articles but few will vote on them. Clarke hints that the passivity of news and video consumption may ultimately weed out news aggregators that cannot automatically deliver customized news. However, Thoof users are allowed to edit the news by suggesting alternative links. If link changes are to stand they must get enough votes from the rest of the community. Thoof has many web 2.0 elements including article tagging, wiki features and aforementioned recommendation engine. It isn’t an exact clone of any one social news site, but can be considered a competitor to sites like Digg, Netscape and Y Combinator company Reddit.
