Prismatic Opens Its News Discovery Service To Everyone, Adds Facebook And Google Reader Sign-Ups

Prismatic has been in invite-only mode for more than a year, but co-founder and CEO Bradford Cross says that changes today.

When I met with Cross earlier this year, he said he chose that approach because he was trying to do something genuinely different — not just bolt social discovery onto existing products, which usually means presenting stuff that was already in your Twitter feed, but really use social and interest data to recommend content that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Now, Cross says Prismatic is serving a million article views to its readers every week. And he’s finally ready to make it open to the general public, so you can judge the product for yourself.

As part of today’s launch, Prismatic has also revamped its on-boarding process. Previously, Cross says it usually took about 24 hours to analyze someone’s Twitter account after they had been invited before Prismatic could present them with social feeds and recommendations. And you had to sign-up with Twitter. Here’s how it should work now:

“Not only have we extended our much-loved onboarding suggestions to work for Facebook and Google Reader, we’ve also sped them up by several orders of magnitude, so they’re usually ready by the time a user is done selecting a username and password. This is not just technically impressive — it also means signing up will be much easier and more fun, and we can wow users with how much we can learn about them in under 60 seconds.”

The company has raised $1.2 million in funding from investors including Battery Ventures and Javelin Venture Partners. You can watch our earlier video interview with Cross here.