The fourth episode of TalkCrunch is a discussion with executives of four of my favorite online feed readers: NewsGator, Attensa, Rojo and Feedlounge.
I brought on Frank Gruber as a co-host, who wrote a comparison post of nine online readers last week on TechCrunch. The conversation focuses on feature comparisions, issues around slowdown as all of these companies are seeing massive growth, and upcoming products in the pipeline.
I did my best to create controversy, even calling “bullshit” on a statement by Chris Alden that the online guys aren’t trying to beat eachother up, but rather grow the RSS market together. We also discussed Feedlounge’s prospects as the only non-free online feed reader on the market.
Guests:
Greg Reinacker, Founder and CTO, NewsGator
Eric Hayes, Founder and VP, Attensa
Chris Alden, Founder and CEO, Rojo
Alex King, Founder, Feedlounge
Running time: 57.00m
Download Size: 26.1MB
I am still for Bloglines. I would rather wait a split second more than pay 5 dollars a month, but that’s just me. Bloglines isn’t exactly that slow for me. It loads in 1-2 seconds which is perfectly fine for me.
I enjoyed the discussiong around coorperation and growing the larger share of the market. At some point however, users are going to get frustrated with seemingly endless supply of feedreaders.
Normal Humans are lazy and will likely use the path of least resistance, regardless of feature set ability –I’m curious to see what will happen when MS gets more involved with Outlook 12 and full release of the next iteration of IE.
Great podcast — I look forward to these podcasts Mike.
Michael,
When was the last time you tried Bloglines and Judged it on Speed? Since the colo-move in December of 2005, Bloglines has been very fast compared to its old speed.
Hi Paul,
Last week, extensively. I noticed improvement earlier this year, but it has deteriorated again, at least for me.
Now that was a great episode! I like the fact that you aren’t afraid to disagree Michael.
One question that I was looking to hear answered was ‘were they afraid of google?’
I believe that all of the companies interviewed are dead in the water and that Google is going to ultimately win this race. Why?… I feel RSS readers should be intergrated with email; advantage Google. It’s only a matter of time before they intergrate gmail and google reader. (I just think that their are some utilities that should not be bloated, rss readers being one of them!)
However, the long term winner of the rss reader crown will be the browser; which gives Google the ultimate lead. Although unconfirmed ‘Gbrowser’ is a strong possibility, and if they are able to seamlessly connect all of their services, who can touch them then?…microsoft maybe.
I don’t want my news integrated with my email. Email is already cluttered enough, I consider them two different things. My email checking patterns are not at all consistent with my news reading patterns. I think the main problem with RSS readers is that people link them too much to what they are familiar with, meaning email. RSS is new and different and you need to think about RSS with a fresh mindset. A major problem with RSS is finding feeds you like, since you typically only get exposure to the last 10 or 20 articles. And when you do find some interesting ones, you get bombarded with all the articles the feeds’ publishers wants you to read, rather then the other way around. It makes more sense to limit the syndication at the source, then at the reader.
That’s where new services like feedbite come into play. It’s less of a feed reading service then it is a feed discovery and feed manipulation service. But they play hand in hand. As more users add feeds to their bundles, the archives will grow. So when you come to hunt for new sources, you have some history available to you for searching and filtering.
Community features are still a bit rough, as it is a beta, but if you follow this company over the next few weeks I think you’ll find something worth investing some time. New features are being released weekly. Mixing and matching atom and rss is coming soon.
Fantastic episode and keep it up.
Firstly because of the speed issues I don’t use an online RSS reader, instead I use a free desktop app called BlogBridge. However I have tried out all 4 readers that were the center of the show and I’ll say if I was to pick between them I would choose FeedLounge every time. There’s two reasons for this:
1. I find both the speed and accessibility of FeedLounge outweighs any of the other RSS solutions in the show, and as Alex said both the speed of downloading the feed and navigating the software is faster.
2. Secondly I would guess a member of FeedLounge is more valued than a member of any free online reader. A member of say Rojo (not meant personally) is no more than a stat, while a member of FeedLounge is someone they need to keep happy. On top of that, free online readers consist of thousands of inactive accounts (usually used as trials by readers) this isn’t the case with FeedLounge every member (within reason) is an active ‘info junky’ and because of that I’d presume that FeedLounge has a better focus of client communication.
Just my thoughts.
We have started a ‘wiki’ for a public RSS aggregator:
http://mytoday.wikispaces.com/
I think I will have to agree ‘Chris’s statement’: “online guys aren’t trying to beat eachother up”
The benefit of syndication especially on the mobile is just market thats going to grow. People have choices and thanks to OPML – trying out new ones will be of now problem.
We plan to launch personalization in our mobile version first soon (by the end of this month)
I need some help in structuring the wiki – so that the entire RSS, feed Reader community can benefit. Suggestions, comments and reviews are welcome. and btw – lovely podcast Mike and Frank amazing review.
“Greg Reinacker, Founder and CTO, NewsGator” sounded like a Microsoft fanboy.
To suggest hat IE7 with RSS will be revolutionary and change the web is marketing speak and completely wrong. What about Firefox and other RSS readers? What about iTunes? I think it will have a longer and greater mpact than IE7.
From his discussion I can only come to the conclusion that your service is IE specific and that is the browser you will provide biased support for. I thought of using your service, but now I will not.
Huh…I’m certainly not a fanboy.
I posted a response to the comment above on my blog:
http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=807
I absolutely loved both Frank’s post and this episode of TalkCrunch. The listeners came in to the discussion well-informed and knowledgable about the features due to Frank’s legwork, and we got to hear some great dialogue and ideas. Listening to all the new features these guys were planning to roll-out and Frank’s statement that he’d conitinue to watch all of these just made me hope that there will be follow-up posts not only to track the new features (which I’m sure TechCrunch will cover anyways,) but also in-depth comparitive reviews of the online feed readers like this in the future, as the players and the features change and evolve.
Good podcast, the show’s improving steadily. Good questions. The only complaint I have (and this has been improving) is that with too many people on the call each person steps over one another.
As for your comment of “I did my best to create controversy” Please don’t. This isn’t Jerry Springer.
Where’s the new TalkCrunch? I’ve been reduced to listening to the Gillmor Gang.
Also check out News Alloy (http://newsalloy.com/)! It’s the RSS reader that I use on a daily basis and it really works fine for, but I haven’t really seen it in these discussions…? Why?
Cheers!
Michael, I love your site and all that it’s doing, but man you were pretty rude on this podcast.
You came across as really condesending and derogatory, which is a shame as you’ve been really objective and balanced in most of the site which is a real plus when reviewing all these new apps and features…
Bloglines is definetly not slow for meat all, and has a simple clean layout. I dont need it to do much more yet. My guess is you probably have a huge amount of feeds? Give it time and I’m sure they will come up with more features.
Michael, I love your site and all that it’s doing, but man you were pretty rude on this podcast.
You came across as really condesending and derogatory, which is a shame as you’ve been really objective and balanced in most of the site which is a real plus when reviewing all these new apps and features…
Bloglines is definetly not slow for me at all, and has a simple clean layout. I dont need it to do much more yet. My guess is you probably have a huge amount of feeds? Give it time and I’m sure they will come up with more features.
michael, it’s refreshing to see someone finally confront some of these web 2.0 CEOs
as for the feed reader market…there are a lot of great readers out there, but i have to agree with jeremiah…the next iteration of IE, Outlook, and myYahoo will make it difficult for any of these readers to compete.
i use google’s reader, it appears to be the fastest.
Michael I don’t necessarily agree on the issue you mentioned in the podcast in regards to personal relevancy being less important or even unattractive as a feature (e.g. Findory) as compared to community relevance based on who’s linking to who (e.g. Techmeme or Digg or Rojo).
You are a journalist so you need to catch every article so that you can make editorial decisions about them – but for the average user they want to know what’s important to THEM – not just what the groupthink has voted for.
There was a discussion about it between our blog and Attention trust that is relevant!
http://www.touchstonegadget.com/blog/2006/06/personal-relevancy.html