So… I really _want_ to like Newsblur. I’ve been using Google Reader since 2005, I have currently 575 subscriptions. Ever since they killed sharing, and had that facelift, I want to find an alternative, but there are a few things in NewsBlur that still bothers me:
Screen estate. Would it be possible to somewhat replicate Reader’s expanded view, with no item list? I’m the guy who reads his feeds 99% the time with All Items, Expanded view. But the item list on top/bottom/left bothers me, because it takes up a lot of screen estate, and I don’t really need to see it. I know I can resize it but then it looks just weird.
Sharing. I can see you’ve already added a number of popular services, would it be possible to add Posterous? That’s the service I (and a few friends of mine) currently use for sharing stuff.
PubSubHubBub. It is said that the paid account refreshes the feeds ‘10x faster’ but will it support PuSH? Realtime feeds are awesome.
Speed. I do find that Reader loads everything way faster at the moment, even though it’s slower than it is used to be.
Intelligence Traning. I know it’s one of the core features but would it be possible to hide it entirelly?
Thanks, and kudos for the project, it is awesome that other people are working on great alternative RSS readers.
I agree with the last 3 points entirely. Live feeds would be fantastic. Speed seems like it’s always an issue, or at least frequently-intermittently (happens regularly.) I still have no idea what the intelligence training is and kind of don’t know if I should care – at the end of the day I just want to read all of my stories.
Screen estate is important too, and I’ve never been good at sharing
* Screen real estate: You can hit ‘u’ to hide the sidebar, but the story titles have to stay. I’m thinking about building a story pane view that is more closely aligned with Reader’s view, but not yet. Just make the story titles pane smaller.
* Sharing - Just needs the votes. Ideally I’d build an abstract sharing button that allows you to “Send to” any site you choose. But that takes time and I’m one person. Posterous just needs the votes. I recommend posting a single GetSatisfaction idea for posterous and seeing if other folks are interested.
* PubSubHubbub - This is on my short list. I actually have been beta testing real-time on the client-side for a month now, trying to weed out the bugs. I’m using Redis/Node/Socket.io to instantly update the client when new servers are found by the feed fetcher. PuSH would make the server real-time as well. It’ll come soon, but after social.
* Speed - Also on the short list. There is a bit change in how unread stories are marked that I need to write. Post-social, but absolutely critical.
* Intelligence - It’s part of the core feature set of NewsBlur. You should probably learn how to use it, as it allows you to filter out stories you don’t want to read (sending them to the red bucket), and optionally highlights stories you do want to read (sending them to the green bucket). As long as you read in the yellow bucket, you’ll get to skip any red stories automatically. And if you have very little time, you can go to the green bucket and just read the good stuff.
Integrating a Share feature with a widget for Wordpress would allow key news items to automatically appear in blogs. I used to utilize the Share button from Google to highlight stories for readers to follow.
I am “small-time,” about 75,000 pages views per month, however such exposure could not help but promote Newsblur as a serious competitor to Google. It would help bloggers like me and expand your usage as well.
Thanks for a great product.
