Thursday, August 11, 2005

A Findory feed reader

Like many others, we've been frustrated by the shortcomings of current RSS readers. They're slow. They're hard to set up. Once you finally set them up, they're a burden to use, painful clicking and skimming repeated again and again.

We wanted a better feed reader. It should be fast. It should be easy. It should help you find interesting articles.

So we decided to build it.

Try it out! Go to the Findory Favorites page. If you don't have any favorites feeds yet, add a few by clicking on source names (e.g. "BBC") and click the "Add Favorite" button.

It's fast, easy to use, and helps you find interesting news and weblog articles. It's what a feed reader should be.

On the left, you'll find favorite feeds with new articles are in bold and suggested other feeds listed below. In the middle, you'll see articles from the feed with recommended and new articles marked. On the right, you can read recommended articles from other feeds, an easy way to discover new news sources and articles.

But, wait, there's more. If you have at least three Favorites, you can see recommended stories from all your feeds combined by clicking "My Top Stories". Perfect for quickly surfacing the most interesting articles from your favorite sources.

I love this feed reader. It's fast, easy to use, and full of the discovery features I know and love at Findory. No one else has anything like it.

Try it! And please let us know what you think.

Update: We've had a couple requests for adding arbitrary feeds (by RSS URL) and importing OPML. Yep, absolutely! In fact, that's the main thing we're working on for the next few weeks. We're huge believers in launching early and often. We knew the current version would be exciting and useful to readers. So, we wanted to get it out there. More coming soon!

Update: We just added OPML import. Details at "Findory RSS reader, part II".

5 comments:

Andy Harbick said...

Two ideas for you:

1. Import from bloglines.com. I've got all of my feeds setup in bloglines. I'm unlikely to try out your reader for any long period of time unless I can configure it comparably to bloglines, and I'm too lazy to migrate everything.

2. You should include the ability to add feeds from your feed builder My findory tech feed is among the few sources of technology news that I use.

Greg Linden said...

Thanks, Andy. Those are great ideas. We definitely will add OPML import and might be able to use the Bloglines API to make it easy to transfer over your Bloglines subscriptions.

Dustin Luther said...

Related to the first comment. So many of the blogs that I follow have a commercial bent to them (they are real estate related!), so they don't show up on Findory due to your policy of not displaying blogs that sell things.

As much as I enjoy Findory, I'm not going to be able to migrate to this new tool as my default blog reader until I can read entries from those sites!

(And yes, this is a very indirect way of saying that I'd really like my site, Rain City Real Estate Guide, to show up on Findory!)

Usernomics said...

I wish there was a feed reader that permitted blocking duplicates and specified keywords.

Does such an animal exist?

Also, you might want to add my usability blog on Findory: http://www.usernomics.com/news/user-interface-design-news.html.

Bob

Hemant Bhanoo said...

Greg, The instant you provide easy import from bloglines, I will switch. Thanks for getting around to providing a feedreader.
-Hemant.