Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Ian Clarke, founder of Thoof. Thoof is doing game-changing work in the area of personalized news websites. Ian was previously at Revver.com which is riding the huge consumer video wave.
Q: How did the idea for Thoof come about, and tell us about the team that launched it?
After building Revver’s initial website, I shifted my focus to what I considered the key challenge for Revver: to figure out what videos users want, and show them. I started doing a lot of research into collaborative filtering, and other similar techniques which try to determine the individual preferences of users based on past behavior. I realized that there were a number of problems with most existing approaches to this, and I started thinking about a solution. This
solution is at the heart of Thoof.
I focused on the user-generated news area because this had interested me back since I became an early user of a website called Slashdot back in 1997, and I believed that today’s user-generated news websites are lacking in a number of important respects that are limiting their growth. The first being the way they decide which stories they should show to their users, and the second being the very low quality of those stories.
Q: What did you learn from the launch of Revver that you have been able to apply to Thoof?
Many things, but I think the big one is to listen to your users, and respond to their feedback, complaints, and suggestions as quickly as you can. Just as our technology seeks to listen to users, figure out what they want, and give it to them quickly, our development process seeks to do the same. Most of the features deployed since launch have been in direct response to user demand and feedback.
Q: Does the business require the level of capitalization that would make venture backing an option for you?
A: Thoof has raised $1m in seed funding from angel investors including Ron Conway and local investment from Austin Ventures. We are currently raising our Series A round.
Q: The competition around news websites is very intense, with everyone trying to knock Digg.com off their pedestal. How is Thoof different and unique?
A: There are certainly many websites that are trying to emulate Digg, however they all seem to be emulating exactly the wrong things. Most emulate the way that Digg selects stories for readers, whereas we believe this is one of Digg’s greatest weaknesses. Most emulate the way that users give feedback on what stores they like and don’t like, we also believe this is a mistake. Lastly, none have a good solution to ensuring good story quality, something we do by allowing users to edit inaccurate stories – an approach conceptually similar to Wikipedia.
I should also point out that Thoof’s destination website is only a part of our business, we also license our recommendation technology to other content providers.
Q: Where do you see the evolution of personalized news space headed in the next 5 years, and what will that mean for consumers?
A: I see the personalized news space today to be about where the search space was around 1996/1997. If you remember, before Google, people weren’t really focused on the problem of selecting the search results most likely to interest the user. Google had a powerful solution to this problem, and had a correspondingly dramatic impact on the market.
Similarly, prior to Thoof, news and information discovery services really haven’t properly addressed the question of how best to get the right content in front of the right users. We believe we have a powerful and defensible solution to a fundamental problem that other’s have scarcely even identified as a problem to-date.
I wouldn’t be so-bold as to claim that we will be the next Google, but in terms of the personalized news market, I think an analogy with the search market of a decade ago is apt.
Q: As you scroll down the news page, it magically fills in more stories at the bottom before you reach the bottom. This is just one example of some cool innovations in the user experience. Tell us about some others?
A: Two of our newest features are Instant Video and Images. With Instant Video when users click on supported videos on Thoof, rather than being taken to another website, the video will pop up and play right there on the Thoof.
With Images, when users submit or edit a story, they can select an image thumbnail to be displayed with it. The images will be extracted from the page that is linked to. Thoof will do its best to choose images from this page that are an appropriate size, and with appropriate content. Other users will be able to propose that the article uses a different image.
Q: What cool things can we hope to see in the future from Thoof?
A: We’re going to continue to add new features as fast as we can. We’ve been averaging almost one new feature per week.