When I pressed "flip" to signify that I did not like the content, it bought me to a login box. I have decided that the content they gave me is not useful, and their response is to ask me to create an account with them?
This is the point where Uncov would have posted a 'FAIL' picture.
Cookies identify computers, which is close enough to identifying people to work in the short term.
We usually advise startups never to make people create accounts if they can avoid it. Let new visitors do as much as they can without registering, but give them the option of creating an account if they want to save whatever state they've accumulated.
Cookies are ephemeral and people get pissed off if you set them to expire 14 years from now, for example. What these guys are doing is probably classifying data with SVMs (or something like that) and that takes time. From brief testing, their updates are not realtime. So I think having an account to personalize in this case isn't such a bad thing. You can search as much as you want but when it comes time to personalization, account is not a bad thing.
But in any case, I don't see how this product is better than Google News, for example.
I don't like the new name, 'pressflip' makes it sound like it's focussed on newspapers. Presumably the idea is that you 'press' on things you like and 'flip' things you don't, but then shouldn't it be 'clickflip'?
Also, if anyone actually got around to creating an account, what do you think about the Google-style settings/signout thing in the top right-hand corner of the screen?
It seems to work well enough. I put in topics, it spits out stories. I "flip" articles, they go away, hopefully some robot takes notice and makes the next set better.
But I can't help wonder what the bigger plan is for this service. It doesn't seem that a not-really-targeted but maybe-smart news recommendation system will fly -- who's the market?
Being asked what I'm interested in was a surprisingly novel moment. The economics of attention are favoring "pushed" information, which I hadn't consciously noticed until now.
This is the point where Uncov would have posted a 'FAIL' picture.