Sign up or log in today to our public beta for an exciting new Thoora experience. This is our first product upgrade since we launched in June, and the enhancements are pretty killer, if we do say so ourselves.

Here’s what’s on tap (and we’ll leave it to you to imagine what our dev team will have ‘on tap’ later today!):

▸ Explore the Best of Thoora
Hit ‘Explore’ to browse the most popular Thoora Topics, some of the finest Topic creators and Featured Topics to keep you up-to-date on what’s happening around the web.

▸ Train the Engine
Get busy with the ‘heart’ and ‘trash can’, and Thoora will get better and better at delivering content that reflects these choices. Get specific about why you are deleting items (sketchy source, not relevant?) and we promise to fill your Topics with better quality and more customized information.

▸ Share Your Topic DNA
Get nosy and go behind-the-scenes on all the Topics on Thoora. Keywords, followers, Topics by the same creator – it’s all there so dive in!

And that’s just the beginning! See many, many more new features, including support for special characters in keywords, automatic keyword suggestions, and the ability to see who’s following your Topics.

And finally, we are thrilled to announce our next batch of au-THOORA-ties:

▸ ALTERNATIVE ENERGY, from @RichPhoto, Photographer/New media producer
▸ SMALL BUSINESS, from @HeatherRast, Brand and Content Strategist
▸ DEBT CEILING, from @Chul_Lee, Thoora, CTO
▸ US ECONOMY, from @CharlesBivona, Social Media Writer
▸ TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) MIDNIGHT MADNESS, from Kiva Reardon, Graduate Student and Writer
▸ ENVISIONING INFORMATION, from @LuzMCosta, Web and Content Developer

Let us know what you think of the new features. We’ve got our ears open in the comments section below, on Get Satisfaction, Facebook and Twitter.

As we prepare for our Beta launch, this gap is something our team thinks about constantly. Can we bridge the gap – build the better mousetrap – that makes humans less of a factor and computers more reliable? Over the last several years, we’ve realized one thing: we can’t. And even more importantly, we don’t want to. Computers and humans are better together – and without one or the other, we’re going to keep arriving at dead ends.

Human versus Machine: the Beauty

You know what machines are really good at? Automated tasks. Math. Algorithms. Equations. Logical sequences. And while that might describe your last date (as humans can be quite good at those things, too), there are a few things that computers just aren’t so great at: tracking obscure patterns. Seeing nuance. Understanding those peculiar, pesky and interesting things that make one statement sarcasm and the other a statement of historical fact. We love logging into our online banking systems and searching for a transaction by merchant or dollar amount – like a game of digital fetch. However, humans are the ones who pick up the phone and call you when your spending patterns get fishy. Are you really in Las Vegas? Was that really you who withdrew $1000 from the ATM at a casino? Did you then spend $567.23 in a Walmart 2,300 miles away?

Computers? They can bring things to our attention, yet it’s humans who identify meaningful patterns.

And How Does This Match Made in Heaven Make My Life Better?

Well, the beauty of humans and machines working together is the dance. One gives, the other turns. With what we’re building here at Thoora, we’ve taken the best of computers – the hunting and gathering aspects – and combined them with something else only humans can lend: passion. A human’s love for music reviews can inspire us to send the Thoora engine out looking, but it’s our passion that can curate what the engine returns: love jazz, but wasn’t looking for the movie “All That Jazz.” And I prefer instrumental jazz, not vocals. And I’d love to see more concert reviews from Toronto (because I just don’t get to Kansas City all that often). And I love the reviews from that local blog that no one knows about. The world needs to know about it!  Let the computers deliver, and the human curate. Whatever our passion, we can highlight the best of the computer’s results , and become more knowledgeable in the process.

Go Fetch

We’re building Thoora to bring you the best, and to be honest, we know we have to be the best. With over 255 million websites at present, you can’t start your search for whatever it is you’re looking for with the entire web. Machines make it manageable. Humans – we make it great. We get the nuances that differentiate blue fish from one fish, two fish and it’s nice to not have to wade through every aquarium and bookstore by hand to get to the one that ultimately means the most to us.

And that’s what Thoora does: we make the starting point manageable so you can track your ever-evolving topics. Then we give you the tools to make it the best of the best. Why settle for less?

We’re back from the DEMO conference in beautiful Palm Desert, California (what a relief – albeit temporary – from this horrible winter) where we re-launched Thoora into private beta amid much fanfare. You can watch our six minute pitch below (grab some popcorn; it’s a nail biter!)

The conference was a terrific event for us; we got lots of good feedback and made lots of new friends. We now have our heads down working furiously to get the beta out to you all. Stay tuned! (And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (@thoora) and Facebook).

- the Thoora team

We’d like to start by thanking you for your loyalty over the last two years. We love that you love us and hope to continue to provide you with the best, most interesting content on the web.

Having exhausted the possibilities of being a news aggregator in today’s online environment, we are excited to be re-launching Thoora as a new way for anyone to quickly curate and share beautiful, discoverable, and self-updating content. To that end, we’re replacing the current Thoora with a private beta of our new product.

We guarantee that all existing registered users of Thoora will be granted priority access to the new beta, provided you register for the beta with the same email address you used for your Thoora account. Initially, the beta will be available on any 7” or greater tablet device. We expect to roll it out to the web shortly.

You can sign up here. And you can provide feedback here.

Again, thanks for your loyalty and we hope you’ll be as excited about the new Thoora as we are.

- the Thoora team.