#trapit

So supervolcanoes -- giant pockets of magma as big as a state, like the one beneath Yellowstone -- form quickly and erupt catastrophically, without warning.

Well played, supervillain. At least your enemies will go quickly.

Personalized news readers are hot right now.  This has long been the holy grail of online news, and now they are finally getting good enough to largely replace old-fashioned news readers.  It's hard to know which one to use, though, so I've written this to break them down.

Most personalized news readers focus on up-to-the-minute, real-time news.  This is certainly valuable, but it is nice to get an idea of what has been going on with a topic in a longer time frame

Trapit reaches farther back in time than most personalized news readers.  It searches for articles published in the last 30 days.  I like this because it lets you get an overview of a topic when you first start following it.  Say you follow "personalized news."  Trapit will go fetch a bunch of articles written on the topic in the last 30 days.  This way, you can see what the larger trends in this space are recently.  

As a bonus, this gives Trapit more fodder for learning what you like. Once I have processed the backlog, Trapit has a good idea what news to recommend to me going forward.  And, indeed, Trapit does a good job learning what I like.

Other personalized news readers are focused on giving you the day's news.  Some of my favorite others are Zite and Prismatic.  They both personalize the day's news for you, and do a good job of it.

Another advantage Trapit has on these two is that it lets you follow far more topics. You cannot directly follow "content discovery" on Zite at all.  You can follow it on Prismatic, but the results are few.  Prismatic works best for topics it has already defined, while Zite works only for topics it has defined.

Trapit is designed to follow any topic you ask for.  Of course, not all topics have many results, but you can be confident that you're getting a good idea of developments in whatever space you're following.

These are the only personalized news readers I regularly use.  Others just don't keep me interested. News.me has been in the news lately for its new iPhone app.  I don't like News.me because it only shows me news that people I follow have shared.  There are two big problems with this approach.  First, I get a lot of news I don't care about.  I always want to hear what Om Malik has to say about the consumer web, but he often tweets about other topics.  The other problem is that the people I follow miss a lot of news that's important to me.  There aren't enough of them to catch everything. Of course, both of these can be seen as pros.  There is something to be said for limiting the amount of news you get, and for getting news that you wouldn't usually read.

The best of both worlds is to be able to switch back and forth between a super-personalized feed and a less personalized feed.  Prismatic does this, letting you can switch from your personalized feed to a social feed like you would find in News.me or a global feed, with content from everybody. There are different levels of serendipity: little from your personalized feed, a medium amount from your social feed, and a lot from the global feed.