CmdrTaco Launches Trove, a Curated News Startup

jigamo writes "The Verge reports on a new app from Slashdot co-founder Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, which aims to provide a user-powered and -curated stream of news. It's called Trove, and it's currently available on the web as well as iPhones and iPads. From the article: 'Trove basically lets users opt in to feeds of stories that align with their interests. Users are encouraged to curate "troves," collections of stories that relate to a particular theme.' You can also read CmdrTaco's announcement post." Rob says, "At its simplest, Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space. Trove uses automated harvesting and machine learning to simplify a workflow for curators interested in ANY topic. The idea is that this opens up non-nerdy subjects. This will let us maintain a strong signal/noise ratio for casual users less interested in expending effort to get their news across diverse subject matter."

Comments

Re:The point where I stopped reading

[gstoddart]

If your website needs a dedicated app on mobile platforms, you're either doing something wrong or doing something unethical.

Are you kidding me? I'd say at least 50% of the web sites I visit these days have a "download our app" link. I'd say over 90% have a "like us on Facebook" or "Follow us on Twitter" link.

Now, I believe this precludes neither wrong nor unethical (or both), but it seems the marketing weenies have decided that "ZOMG, we need teh app".

Me, I don't know why people don't just use the web -- though, that becomes perilous when they decide "I see you're on a mobile device, so let me redirect you to our shitty mobile website so it's not possible to find the link you were following".

In my experience, every mobile web site I've been redirected to is complete crap.