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Firefox's Pocket Tries to Build a Facebook-Style Newsfeed That Respects Your Privacy (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Pocket, which lets you save articles and videos you find around the web to consume later, now has a home inside Firefox as the engine powering recommendations to 50 million people a month. By analyzing the articles and videos people save into Pocket, [Pocket founder and CEO Nate] Weiner believes the company can show people the best of the web -- in a personalized way -- without building an all-knowing, Facebook-style profile of the user.
"We're testing this really cool personalization system within Firefox where it uses your browser history to target personalized [recommendations], but none of that data actually comes back to Pocket or Mozilla," Weiner said. "It all happens on the client, inside the browser itself. There is this notion today... I feel like you saw it in the Zuckerberg hearings. It was like, 'Oh, users. They will give us their data in return for a better experience.' That's the premise, right? And yes, you could do that. But we don't feel like that is the required premise. There are ways to build these things where you don't have to trade your life profile in order to actually get a good experience."
Pocket can analyze which articles and videos from around the web are being shared as well as which ones are being read and watched. Over time, that gives the company a good understanding of which links lead to high-quality content that users of either Pocket or Firefox might enjoy.
I use Firefox, but I don't use Pocket. Are there any Slashdot readers who want to share their experiences with read-it-later services, or thoughts about what Firefox is attempting?
"We're testing this really cool personalization system within Firefox where it uses your browser history to target personalized [recommendations], but none of that data actually comes back to Pocket or Mozilla," Weiner said. "It all happens on the client, inside the browser itself. There is this notion today... I feel like you saw it in the Zuckerberg hearings. It was like, 'Oh, users. They will give us their data in return for a better experience.' That's the premise, right? And yes, you could do that. But we don't feel like that is the required premise. There are ways to build these things where you don't have to trade your life profile in order to actually get a good experience."
Pocket can analyze which articles and videos from around the web are being shared as well as which ones are being read and watched. Over time, that gives the company a good understanding of which links lead to high-quality content that users of either Pocket or Firefox might enjoy.
I use Firefox, but I don't use Pocket. Are there any Slashdot readers who want to share their experiences with read-it-later services, or thoughts about what Firefox is attempting?
When I got disgusted with Chrome for its evil-ness, I went back to FF for the nth time, and this time I saw Pocket was being forced down our throats...jumped the fuck back out and found Vivaldi which seems much less evil.
I got pulled back into Firefox by the Developer Edition. I wasn't sold on Pocket at first, but so far it's turn out to be great for me. Easy to ignore when I don't care, but every time I've looked at it there have been good suggestions that I actually wanted to read.
I think the people screaming about how Mozilla needs to get back to just making a browser completely misunderstand Mozilla. The Firefox era was probably the only one where they did anything close to just making a browser. In the early days Seamonkey *was* Mozilla. It was a full suite of things. They were build XUL and XpCom and all of this as a platform with a strong html rendering engine as the backing for it all. I'm sorry that so many of you were confused by the breakout success of Firefox, but the organization has never been so narrowly defined.
"[We'll be] really getting inside your head and making it an unpleasant place to be" -- Trent Reznor