There was a time when there were a lot of posts being written about the intricacies of pinging PubSubHubbub and how often RSS feeds refreshed in the various readers on the market. But then social networks came along and people started to use them instead of news readers, something that never made much sense to me since you then a slave to the stream and missed anything published while you were looking away. RSS let you time-shift your reading and it’s still the way I consume most of my news.
All that is by way of intro to NewsBlur, the first company I’ve read about in a while that seems interested in maintaining a pure RSS experience. As opposed to something like Flipboard, which may use RSS in the backend but doesn’t expose it to the reader. Which is fine since that’s just an example of how powerful, albeit ultimately invisible, RSS can be and why those who dismiss it are missing out on what I still maintain is the most exciting technology of the social web.
I’ll be trying out NewsBlur on a limited basis (they have a freemium model and I’m going to see how the free version stacks up to Google Reader) and seeing how I like it. It may not be perfect, but it’s great to a company that realizes the power of pure RSS feeds and is doing something to capture that.
Hey Chris, thanks for writing about NewsBlur. I’ll admit, I dislike the concept of forcing users to think about RSS when all they want to see if their sites coming to them. You’ll notice that the only place on NewsBlur where we even say the word RSS is in the Add Site dialog, and even that is changing in a coming design revision.
Our goal is to move into the mainstream by giving new users categories to which they can subscribe. Power users like you and me can still import over OAuth from Reader, and even add individual sites. But if we want to see NewsBlur succeed, we have to make the technology easier to use, and that means simplification of the UI.
Believe me when I say this, I don’t want to abandon power users, and as we transition into a mainstream application, I will continue to allow for the power-user flow.
Now go get a premium account.
You’ll be happy you did.
Thanks so much for your reply here Samuel. I’m really excited about trying NewsBlur out since, as I said, it’s been so long since anyone was building anything new and interesting for RSS and I definitely want to support those that do. I completely understand and appreciate your approach toward RSS for both the casual and power users and will be watching to see how you guys tread that line while building the product out. Great stuff, I’m sure.