How to Use Prismatic to Discover the News You Care About
As the title of my blog implies, I’m a curious person. I like learning, and I’m addicted to keeping up on the latest news about things I’m interested in: programming, design, and the like. Sometimes I find it hard to keep up with it all. About a month ago, I discovered Prismatic, and it’s changed how I read the web by making it easier to find the news that I care about.
Prismatic scans all of the links that come across Twitter (that’s a lot of links), and categorizes them using some fairly sophisticated software (written in Clojure), and then matches those links to you based on who you follow and what you tweet about. It sifts through all of Twitter to find the stuff that YOU care about. That’s powerful.
Getting started with Prismatic is easy. Sign in and link it to your Twitter accounts and it will present you with a list of articles that you will like, based on your Twitter activity. You can also tell Prismatic what you’re interested in, by adding, well, interests. They seem to have just about everything, so whatever you’re looking for is likely to be there.
Prismatic gives you the stuff you care about presented in a single “river of news” format - as you get to the end of the page, it loads more articles for you. They pull out a little it of the article to give you an idea of what it’s about, and show you a sampling of what people on Twitter are saying about it. Each article that you see has a couple of controls on it that let you tell Prismatic what you like and dislike, which will adjust what it shows you based on that feedback. In theory, at least, it will learn over time what you want to see and show you more of what you like, and less of what you don’t.
I’ve been using Prismatic for a month now, and I’m completely addicted. It’s a great way to find news about the things you’re interested in, has some great features, and there’s certainly more to come (an iOS app is in the works according to their blog). Try it out and let me know what you think.