If you accept that premise, you are building a product for informed, longish-term computer users, and you are treating them like they are beginners. If my intrest was piqued by RSS I probably already use an RSS reader, and have a bunch of feeds I want to use.
You are missing the ability for me to organize my feeds into folders. I have a lot of feeds, and I need folders to triage my reading into a sliding scale from important to least important.
After all of this keep it up, because I am, and I think many others are, willing to pay for an app that does RSS reading well.
P.S I currently use Google Reader and am looking for alternatives.
As discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834305
It has folders, hotkeys, and I think I like the layout more than Google Reader (I'm still in the early stages of switching over).
Google Reader is an atrocious experience, albeit one that probably has a couple of useful apps, and Bloglines is a joke. Fever requires you to roll your own with all the hassle and risk it entails, but a paid, hosted service sounds like a great way to go about it in the way that pinboard.in did compared to del.icio.us.
Just think about it, and if you continue with a free model, you can always consider pivoting, if you find that the current model isn't sustainable. Of course, that means that this is a full-time endeavour, which may or may not fit into your lives.
The current state of the project reminds me of Instapaper in its infancy. It will be interesting to follow you.
The recent Google+ integration into Google Reader made the product take a step backwards. Then you have apps like Reeder (which was my favorite at some time), Pulse (became my next favorite), and then Flipboard (which has won me personally).
Except, I feel like something is missing from all of them.
Google Reader has this awesome Sort by Magic feature, but seems to have been broken recently. If applications could use this sorting method and bring in social better (the integration is lacking right now) it would be awesome!
It looks really great and it has some quite comprehensive features. Which actually sends me back to what one of LinkedIn's founder once said[1]: If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late
If this is the first MVP of the idea, it might be worthwhile checking out Ash Maurya's great post[2] on the subject.
[1] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-11-13/strategy/3006...
[2] http://www.ashmaurya.com/2009/11/from-minimum-viable-product...
Sort of OT, but I'm not sure this is really broadly useful advice. In the world of iOS apps, for instance, that first impression is often the only one you'll get before people move on. Hard to say which is the correct approach for an app like this but sometimes it pays to polish the hell out of 1.0 instead.
But don't forget that MVP is primarily a tool for learning with the least amount of effort. Not less. So, if you are making something nobody wants, why make it very polished? You will just waste more time learning this fact. Time that could be used changing the product/trying something new entirely.
And even on app store: you can iterate with different product names, and different brands. So you can lunch different iterations, possibly A/B testing app name, logo and description, without much extra overhead, all at the same time.
2. OPML import? Already have a set of RSS subscriptions, need to be able to import existing feed list, don't wish to reenter all these in…
/goodluck on the venture.
What is broken though is they don't seem to support folders.
Though I do not expect it to work after importing… …I have A LOT of feeds -- I see the subscription titles showing but it seems to be stuck on "refresh" right now…
This is a great MVP, but for me, there is one feature I would NEED before I would consider switching.
Google Reader shows you a count of how many posts are unread, and as you read them, it removes it from the list. That feature is the most important for me. Any plans on addressing this? Or do you already have this and I'm just not seeing it?
We know there are still lots of things that need improving (handling lots of feeds, how new items are displayed, organizing feeds, etc) - we'll do our best to get to these asap, but wanted to get this 'out the door' as quickly as possible to get your feedback.
That said, I was really hoping you'd have your own sharing mechanism. The major thing Google Reader lost in the transition was the ability to share and comment in a unified manner - having to go to Twitter or Facebook to read comments on something you shared elsewhere is a pain.
Also, doesn't look like there's any tracking of read/unread items.
Specifically:
sharing, comments, bookmarklet for non-rss content.
Float (float.com) has an interesting idea of removing everything except content from facebook/twitter/etc, which I like, but they are still missing a usable webapp and the aforementioned features.
BTW I thought there will be easy way to import Google reader list but there is none. (I first selected interesting then blank.)
The design is nice.
Don't show the entire story when you visit one of the categories. Just show headlines.
It rendered terribly slowly, scrolling was jerky, and page navigation was completely unresponsive. Eventually the browser just crashed.
The first category I visited was Science. It showed science stuff.
The next category I visited was Film. It also showed science stuff.
When looking at my subscriptions I clicked on the pub in the upper left to go to your homepage (to add a pack to my subscriptions) and what it does is change the view in some way that's totally not obvious to me. I get a different top story. Maybe its changing the sort order, but theres' no visual indication of what has changed, only the story I was reading is replaced. I click it again and it switches back.
Great MVP, and bonus points for the effortless signup.
How does your RSS reader beat the competition? Anything of note?
However, as a heavy RSS user, an MVP isn't gonna cut it for me.
Couple of specific things are going to prevent me from using your product:
1. Your UI shows way too few feed items on a page. Compared to Google Reader, for example, you display maybe 30% as much content on a single page. That makes reading RSS feeds slow on your product.
2. There is no ability to group RSS feeds in any way. I'm not a single interest kinda of a person, so my RSS subscriptions contain all kinds of content. I don't read all that content the same way, and I don't feel like reading some of the content all the time.
I like the filtering capability you have on the feeds. This is something I've been missing for some time. I wish you'd expand it from simple keywords to maybe regular expression based. Look into how killfiles in Usenet clients used to work for inspiration maybe.
1. On Chrome in Windows, the smaller fonts look a bit scrunched in a way that makes my eyeballs hurt. Is this configurable?
2. I notice that you say to bookmark the URL, and I presume my user id is stored in a cookie. What happens if I want to read from another device or if I clear my cookies? It would be awesome if you could generate a unique URL for each user. Bonus points if it's easy to say over the phone or type in by hand/from memory (I use at 4-5 devices to browse the web daily - 2 x laptops, Playbook, and my BB).
3. That Tweet sidebar thing is interesting but feels a little laggy. Is there a way to turn it off?
2. It would be nice to have a more integrated sharing feature. An ideal method for my group of computational science friends (since migrating off Google Reader and being dissatisfied with long threads on G+) would be linking into a (possibly private) reddit. It would be nice to at least see if the item has been shared yet.
Would be nice to be able to import my Google Reader subscription list so I can instantly compare the two tools.
The Tweets and shared comments is an interesting idea, but took me a while to find - this is the one thing that would get me to come back and use this over Google Reader. Nice differentiator.
I like the interface and the fact that you don't need to sign up. Not sure if I'll remember to come back to this because it really isn't working for me right now.
I'm currently using Google Reader to keep track of things for me. I sync it up with iReadG on my iPhone and then I scan through headlines on my iPhone and star the ones I'm interested in reading. I do this while I'm out and about and need to kill some time while waiting on things in life to happen. Just scanning headlines from HN, Slashdot and TechCrunch usually fills all my mobile downtime.
Then when I get back to the computer I go through the star items and read them, unstarring them as I go.
Your interface would be nice if I could work it into my workflow but it doesn't look setup for that.
Here are some questions I had:
1. what does a user expect to happen next when they click on a subscription pack?
2. why is your landing page dark while your app is light?
3. why isn't there an action when a user clicks "All your favorite websites in one place."
4. why isn't there a clearer call to action?
5. it seems like you're targeting users who don't currently use RSS at all, will they even understand what your product does?
Also, frictionless use is cool and all but it would be nice if I could just create a username and password so I know I'll always have access to my feeds.
http://moustach.io/welcome/e/reviewed/YDtJ9-Su30Q3VH3VGotGnZ...
Good luck.
I was curious as to what JS Frameworks you've been using besides jQuery. Underscore.js? Backbone.js?
http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-12282011-065319pm.p...
