I'm a huge fan of social news. Whether content is user-generated or not matters less than the intelligence of a news network, in my opinion. If users have a hand in deciding what news is best for them, what they want to see, and what they should never see again, and if that service is intelligent enough to remember their choices and give them more of what they like, then it's a good service.
Tiinker, a new social news service with a remarkably intelligent engine, does all of this and more. The service feeds you news, lets you rate it, remembers your preferences for future stories, and lets you manage news-feed subscriptions. Tiinker is in closed beta currently but is accepting invite requests. [Update: Tiinker is now out of beta and open to the public.]
Tiinker has a beautiful interactive interface that's fast and easy to use. The service has a list of news outlets and blogs from which it gathers articles and noteworthy posts, and its engine decides what's worth showing the world. Unlike some similar services, Tiinker aggregates news from thousands of blogs in dozens of categories, including technology, arts and entertainment, health and lifestyle, politics, science, sports, even opinions and op-eds. Tiinker's story-recommendation engine was remarkably good by itself; I noticed a higher quality of stories generated from its sources than the ones that users submit at sites such as Digg and Propeller.
Even though the stories recommended by default were interesting, the story-recommendation engine really shines once you start ranking the stories you're shown. The rating system is simple: You can give any story a thumbs-up/thumbs-down, and as you rank stories, Tiinker remembers your choices and going forward will only show you stories similar to the ones that you've given the thumbs-up.
As you rate stories down, the service eliminates those types of stories and even entire sources from your profile, so you won't see news you're not interested in, and you won't see topics in categories that you don't browse. If you accidentally rate something, you can undo it (a feature missing in other social news services). Tiinker is proud to note that aside from you rating stories, no actual people are involved with generating and displaying stories; the process is completely automated. If you're interested in what everyone else is reading, you can click on the "popular" tab at the top of the page for highly rated stories, or search for specific topics.
If you're a fan of a specific blog or news site, Tiinker can add the feed to your subscriptions page. News from your favorite blogs and Web sites can be added to your Tiinker profile automatically, and you can read it along with everything else Tiinker shows you.
The list of features at Tiinker goes on. The service is a definite improvement on other automated social news sites, such as Thoof, that make similar promises to keep track of what you like and what you don't. Tiinker is planning to add more features: e-mailed story updates, mobile RSS feeds, mobile rankings, and more. For a beta service, it's is remarkably mature.
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