Tiinker - An Aussie personalised news portal that learns what you like and adapts to show you the most interesting stories from all over the web - has hit the Sleep-pool.

Alex North from Deep Grey Labs explained that they’ve stopped actively developing it for now.

We’ve discovered/decided the market isn’t there for a stand-alone personalised aggregator. I don’t believe it will ever grow huge.

Personalisation needs to be built in to existing aggregators and sources, but unfortunately big media aren’t ready yet.

I think this is a real shame. Tiinker has some cool features (I like their ’Try It Now’ option which allows users to maintain quasi-accounts without signing up, via the use of cookies) and the site has a simple design that’s easy to use. On top of that the underlying personalisation technology seemed to work well for me.

They also managed to get some pretty prominent press coverage and this was falling into the category of what people thought would be a Web 3.0-type project.

All-in-all it looked like things were lining up for success.

I really hope that some time in the near future the project gets woken back up or someone comes in and either funds the team or licences their personalisation technology so it doesn’t stop here.

That having been said, this gives the team at Deep Grey Labs more time to work on their interesting tech job board project - Jobreel