Findory is your Personalized Newspaper

Company: Findory
Launched: January 2004
Location: Seattle, WA

I’ve recently become interested in companies that exploit the actions and attention of users to provide personalized content recommendations. We wrote about Attensa’s efforts in this area earlier this week. Personal Bee is also taking a very creative crack at solving the problem (update on them soon).

Findory, which is almost two years old, is a pioneer in this area and has a unique solution.

Findory is a personalized newspaper that evolves, quickly, as you click and read. I’ve been trading emails Greg Linden, Findory’s co-founder and CEO, for a few weeks and we finally had a chance to talk at length a couple of days ago. Greg and his co-founder Alex Edelman, spent years at Amazon prior to creating Findory, and gathered extensive experience in recommending new products to Amazon users.

Findory works. There is no nead to register, it will know who you are via a cookie. If you do register there are additional benefits to the service. I’ve been using it for a while now and it presents exactly what I want to read (technology) on the home page.

They have three silos of information, all personalized – news, blogs and search. Findory looks at your historical clickstream and presents only related information. It evolves real-time as you search, browse, click and read stuff that interests you. Want to add specific feeds that you know you like? Check out their feed page and add them. They also use their personalization algorithm (patent-pending) to present super-relevant google ads on some pages.

It’s a simple idea with powerful technology behind it, and can be classified under “it just works”. Read what others have to say here. Check it out. Findory just may become my new home page. And in true web 2.0 fashion, all of this was created by two people – Greg Linden and Alex Edelman