2011/11/02

NewsBlur: A Social Feed Reader

The NewsBlur Blog / A Social Feed Reader: A little guy (who's been coding this up in his spare time on the train every day) gets a boost from Google Readers mistakes:
"Recently, my main competitor, Google Reader, announced plans to decommission the social features of the site and integrate them into Google+. While Google is busy refocusing on what’s important to them, many users feel left behind. My goal with NewsBlur is to make a better, complete experience for reading sites. This includes social features that make reading a social experience.
Social is a major planned feature. It’s highly prioritized right after I build two other big ticket items: mobile and search. The mobile iPhone app is wrapping up and is already at version 1.1 on the App Store, although I have not publicly launched it because it still needs a few more features (specifically, training and the river of news) to be considered feature-complete.
Once that’s out the door, I have to build search to be able to support social. Search won’t be impossible, since the UI design decisions are fairly straight-foward, and the backend is a no-brainer in terms of design. But it’ll take some time to get right, make fast, and get integrated into the massive database that is quickly accumulating."

2 comments:

Gael vander Schelden said...

Did you try it out?

Ianso said...

I did, and it's not bad - it's basically similar to Reader but without the social features at the moment - it's limited to 64 feeds unless you pay, and it's very cheap to subscribe for a year.

And it's open-source, developed by one guy on his time on the train each morning :-)