Thoof
| Thoof | |
|---|---|
 |
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| URL | http://thoof.com/ |
| Type of site | User generated news website |
| Registration | Free |
| Owner | Thoof, Inc. |
| Created by | Ian Clarke |
| Launched | June 24th, 2007 |
Thoof is a user-generated news website, which automatically personalizes the articles shown to users, and where users can collaboratively edit articles, in a manner reminiscent of Wikipedia.
History
Thoof was founded by Ian Clarke in December 2006, and raised $1M in seed funding from Austin Ventures and Ron Conway in February, 2007. Thoof had a private launch on 15th June, 2007, and went public on 24th June, 2007. The company is based in Austin, Texas.
Functionality
When you visit the front page of Thoof you are presented with a list of stories that have been selected for you by Thoof's personalization algorithm. Clicking on the story titles will open a website in a new window. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, new stories will be added, giving an "infinite scrolling" effect.
You can submit stories, or if you wish to improve the title, link, summary, or tags, you can click on an "improve" button that will allow you to propose an improvement, and/or vote on improvements proposed by other users.
The Digg effect
On October 1 2007 a spoof Mac/PC video was posted to YouTube. In this video Thoof played the role of Mac and showed up various problems with Digg. This video was submitted to Digg the next day and soon hit the front page. Shortly afterwards the Thoof website crashed, presumably from so many Diggers trying to check out this new website.
External Links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
