Prismatic is shutting down its app.
I’ve been fascinated by algorithmic approaches to information overload for quite some time now. It seemed like one of those places where the Web changed everything, and now we need technology to kick in and make our lives so much easier.
Prismatic was one of the more promising attempts to that I’ve seen, and I’ve been a user ever since its launch back in 2012. Every time I opened it, it never failed to find me real gems, especially given the tiny setup it required when I first signed up. Prismatic included explicit feedback controls, but it seemed to excel in using my implicit feedback, which is not trivial at all for a mobile product.
Flipboard is likely the best alternative out there right now, and its excellent onboarding experience helped me get started quickly with a detailed list of topics to follow. With reasonable ad-powered revenue, which Prismatic seemed to shun for whatever reason, it is also less likely to shut down anytime soon. Prismatic still does a much better job than Flipboard in surfacing high-quality, long-tail, non-mainstream sources; let’s hope Flipboard continues improving to get there.
It seems, though, that news personalization is not such a strong selling point. Recently, Apple moved from a pure personalized play for its Apple News app to also add curated top stories, as its view counts disappointed publishers. In my own experience, even the supposed personalized feed was mostly made up of 3-4 mainstream sources anyway. Let’s hope that this is not where information overload is leading us back to. Democratizing news and getting a balanced and diverse range of opinions and sources is a huge social step forward, that the Web and Social Media have given us. Let’s not go backwards.
The Alter Egozi 