oursignal.com – news mashup I actually like

Recent post on software I don’t get was about what I dislike among things I like. Decided to follow up with post about what I like among things I dislike.

I am quite cold to news and hype so it was interesting to catch myself attached to oursignal mashup of popular stories from several social sites.

What it does

oursignal takes currently popular stories from:

• digg
• reddit
• delicious
• hackersnews
• yahoo buzz

And combines them into single extremely visual treemap mashup.

What it got right

The core concept of oursignal is simple and powerful:

• the bigger box the bigger story is;
• the brighter box the hotter story is.

In online world of lists and numbers such approach is somewhat original and easy to process.

Page refreshes (and auto refreshes) every fifteen minutes so set of stories is always fresh.

Visited links are crossed out with additional option to hide them but latter doesn’t work for me.

What it got wrong

I could argue that service it too simplistic, gives no control over sources and so on. I also understand that adding ton of features would probably ruin it. :)

The one problem it really needs to solve it why do I have to stare at those boxes I have zero intention to click.

Overall

Site is excellent way to just pick something fresh and interesting to read without having to look for it and randomness of StumbleUpon. With such choice of sources it would be mostly interesting to techies but I don’t expect anyone else reading this post.

Link http://www.oursignal.com/

PS I think Postrank could learn a bit from this one.