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.

The last time we wrote about Findory was over a year ago. Ironically, it was to note that they had turned cash flow positive. Today, founder Greg Linden said he’s going to stop development of the site and put it on “autopilot.”

Findory is a personalized newspaper. It looks at stuff you tend to like to read, and compares that to others’ tastes, and presents customized news to you. The more you use it, the more it knows about you and the better the results.

The site hasn’t made much progress over the last few years. It peaked in early 2006 according to Alexa and has gone sideways since then – Linden tells me the site generates 1 – 2 million page views per month. This is another sign that the online news space is grossly oversaturated. It will take a significant technology step forward for a new startup to get traction.

Findory is now in the DeadPool.

Congratulations to Greg Linden, who reports that Findory is now cash flow positive. If you’d like to know more about Findory, my original profile, written on September 5, 2005, is here.

Findory has a first-class personalization engine for blog and other news (see our profile on September 3, 2005).

Findory has built up a loyal following in the nearly two years since its launch. However, many users requested the ability to include RSS feeds of their choice directly into their blog and news channels. Greg and Alex just added this functionality, making Findory nearly perfect as a news source and reader.

Findory users now have the ability to add feeds directly into Findory – one at a time, via an OPML cut-and-paste or simply by directly importing your feeds from Bloglines, if that is your current reader. You can also import other users’ public Bloglines feeds.

Once you’ve imported these feeds, the powerful Findory personalization engine takes over and presents posts to you in a personalized way, based on what you (and community members like you) tend to find interesting. Click on TechCrunch posts a lot, and you’ll start to see lots of new posts from TechCrunch and other blogs on new web 2.0 companies.

Findory is squarely attacking the current efforts by Attensa, SearchFox, Personal Bee and others to present your feed information in a more intelligent and useful way. The standard readers quite simply don’t work for power users with 100+ feeds any more – and companies are trying very hard to find ways of sorting through this information for you before you start to read.

And unlike Attensa (who hasn’t launched their personalization product yet) and SearchFox (in private beta, although you can get an invite fairly easily), Findory is live and open to everyone.

Findory does not support folders, so if you tend to group your feeds that way Findory will not work well for you. If you methodically check your feeds and like knowing what order they are in, you may want to stick to your current reader. But it is very fast, and does group informaiton well according to interests.

Additional Reading

Inside Google, SEW, BlogHerald, Threadwatch, New Media Hack, RSS Compendium Blog

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