CUNY Academic Commons

On TAPoR: http://tapor.ca/tools/797

Content curation and topic discovery website based primarily on publishers the user follows through social media.

Upon signing up, users are asked to select a number of topics that fall within their fields of interest. Relevant content is shown in a vertical feed. Users have the option to recommend, comment, share, remove the content from their feed, or save it. Prismatic “learns” from your behaviour which topics and publishers are of most interest to you. They say the more people who use it the better it gets, as recommendations figure greatly into popularity rankings. There are no human editors, just algorithms.

Promoted features include connecting with communities who share your interests, learning from users who work in your field, the ability to share your discoveries with friends, and taking a “deep dive on any topic.”

According to Aria Haghighi, one of the founders “…we have an architecture similar to a search engine: polling and crawling the open web and activity on social networks.” A 2013 article on Slate.com refers to Prismatic as “the world’s smartest news reader”. It’s a good addition to other search and curation tools such as Google Alerts and saved Twitter hashtag searches. It aims to be better than the rest through use of parameters that are not static; it adjusts to your preferences as well as trending content on other social media sites.