Personalized newspaper service Findory is finally closing, after remaining on life support since January when development ceased.
Founder Greg Linden has now posted that the site will now be shut November 1.
Linden took the opportunity to preach the gospel of personalized news, despite Findory’s failure:
Some day, online newspapers will focus on your interests, building you your own unique, customized front page of news. Some day, search engines will learn from what you do to help you find what you need. Some day, your computer will adapt to your needs to help with the task at hand. Some day, information overload will be tamed.
Strangely, despite a fairly smart looking platform, there has been no apparent effort at selling the site and/ or backend; I would have thought an eBay exit would have suited the site well. Findory will now properly join the TechCrunch Deadpool.
If the tracking services are correct, Findory gets very little traffic anymore, so maybe it wouldn’t be even worth selling…
But what exactly is the reason they are shutting? spent all the money?
Greg was approached about a sale, but he’d refused it. Pity that it is closing shop.
I suppose there is a the risk that they could of sold it for very little and then see someone else turn it around and sell it for big bucks…
@ Darren: wouldn’t that still be better than shutting it down completely?
Matt,
I am guessing here, but I think came down to whether Greg wanted to sell something that was quite close to his heart and I think he did not want to do that.
I have personalized news sources such as Google News, My Yahoo, etc and I find that it makes news stale. It seems to eliminate the “discovery” aspect of reading the news.
I agree with Linden’s statement. Computerized systems focused on consumers (read consumers in general, which includes enterprise consumers) should definitely help though the tedious task of info overflow. Current services are a good beginning, but still come up short.
I never used Findory, so I can not tell you how well it went about Linden’s ideas.
did they ran out of budget…??
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com