Thoora is a new sort of aggregator for the content that users are trying to find online. It has some sort of an algorithm to find both content and “reactions,” the latter of which seems like it’d be very complicated to do. The problem that Thoora is trying to solve is to find “what people are talking about” and display that.
Keep in mind that this isn’t Digg or Techmeme, but sort of a revamp of those. Rather than requiring submissions and some level of clout to make those big, Thoora just uses its own system. As a lot of you know, many of the aggregators now are very gameable. Of course, Thoora probably is still gameable in some way, but as of now it doesn’t seem as easy to play as the other sites out there.
Specifically, Thoora is looking to drive traffic to blogs, and the good blogging content at that. Thoora somehow ranks that based on quality (presumably automagically as parsing the entire blogosphere would require some sort of wizardry I can’t even fathom). If it works, this could be very big as it’d turn blogging into a bit more of a meritocracy. I’ve seen many a high quality post go unnoticed just because the author didn’t post it on one of the higher traffic sites. But, as the panel points out, the idea could be a little flawed. After all, Thoora claims to be picking up stories based on user reactions, but the best content doesn’t get the biggest reactions. The most read stuff gets the biggest reactions.
Of course, Thoora is going to have its work cut out for it if it wants to really get users. Given that sites like Digg are already so popular, it’ll take a lot to convince people that they can just stick with Thoora instead of needing to open up all those other tabs. Besides, scraping every site ever for content might result in some serious legal issues.
