tiinker, built by Deep Grey Labs, a start-up from Sydney Australia, is an “intelligent news aggregator.” Essentially, it is an RSS reader that lets you vote stories as interesting or not interesting. Based on these votes, tiinker is supposed to show you stories, via the numerous RSS feeds they consume, that are interesting to you. The site allows visitors to add their own RSS feeds as well which are added to the mix of stories presented to you.

tiinker is not a typical RSS reader however. The interface is not customizable and posts from feeds are not presented together. tiinker is more like Google News, but supposedly intelligent.

The site is currently in private beta. In a recent blog at the tiinker site, Oleg Sushkov posted his thoughts on some of the challenges that tiinker faces when opening to the public. One big challenge is getting the right word out, as Oleg put it. It is important for visitors to understand that tiinker is not just another RSS aggregator. Another challenge is getting new visitors to hang around long enough for tiinker to learn their preferences.

Mashable posted their thoughts on tiinker and gave them some grief on the “lack of options”. They compared the site to other RSS aggregators like Google Reader, Netvibes, and Bloglines. However, that is not what tiinker appears to be going for as a target market. I do agree with one of their points and that is that tiinker should have all the features of other RSS aggregators and then plug in their AI to that. But that is an area for them to strive towards, I don’t think it is a must have feature.

I’ve spent about a week playing with tiinker — voting stories up and down. I enjoyed the site from the beginning just based on the amount of stories that are presented. The randomness of the stories (they’re not presented by site, just by topic) was nice. There were very few duplicates stories presented from separate news sources (and that may have just been luck). I don’t think that tiinker has quite learned my preferences yet, but it is doing an OK job of presenting stories that interest me.

There is also a section that shows popular stories within the tiinker community, however there is no ranking displayed on the stories, so this is not just another social bookmarking/news site. And, if you see a story that might interest you, but you don’t have the time to read it, tiinker has a “scrapbook” function which lets you mark the story for later.

tiinker is a good idea. It will be interesting to see if this site takes off. You can request an invite at tiinker.com, or you can leave a comment here with name and email (or email me bryan at thisdomain) and I’ll accommodate those of you that I can.