Alertle isn't your typical start page. A
web-based RSS reader at its core, Alertle is really a new way of surfing the
web. The service allows you to "visit" various web sites by clicking on the web
site's icon which is located in a panel at the top of the Alertle home page. The
3-panel layout of this page, with icons at the top and what is essentially an
RSS reader below, makes it easy to find and read content.
You know Alertle is trying to be unique from the moment you sign up - the registration process itself is slightly odd as you are prompted to enter your email and password way up at the top-right of the page instead of under the "Click here to signup" button you just pressed. An unobservant new user may even miss this and think the button was broken.
Once logged in, Alertle has pre-subscribed you to over 1000 feeds, already broken down into categories like News, Tech, Life, Travel , Autos, Amazon.com, Sports, Health, Videos, Gaming, eBay, Weather, Gossip, Nasdaq, Funnies, Business, Food, Digg, and NYTimes.
As you click through the tabs and click on the icons for the various web sites, you have a good portion of the internet at your fingertips without needing to enter URLs in the address bar to visit the sites themselves. Of course, techies may not see why this is any more useful than Google Reader or Netvibes, but then again, we're not the target market.
Says Varun Mathur of Zytran Corp., Alertle's parent company, their goal with this product is to
"extend the concept of RSS to the mainstream user." Not a bad idea.
So I showed Alertle to some "mainstream" users who have never heard of RSS and they got it right away without much explanation needed. What's more, they thought it was "cool." From the first sign in
(yes, I did have to walk some of them through that due to the odd placement of the text entry boxes), my Luddite friends quickly figured out how to watch videos, read comics, and catch up on the the latest news. They also jumped onto the eBay and Amazon tabs, clearly amazed that you could browse through auctions and products without having to actually visit these web sites.
Although you can customize the content by adding your own feeds and removing others, this wasn't something that really caught their eye upon first glance.
(Apparently, a mainstream user's first thought isn't "how can tweak this to make it better?") Alertle also offers a customized view that combines all feeds into one view. Unfortunately, they decided to call this view the "Sigma View" and made it accessible via a button with that Greek letter on it. This was a little too offbeat for these typical non-technical users to pick up on, so that didn't really work. But overall, Alertle was received positively by this group.
So does Alertle appeal to mainstream users? Based on my unscientific, extremely small sample, yes, I think it does. Will they ever hear of Alertle and go sign up for it? Doubtful. If I hadn't asked people to try it, they would never have known of its existence and I don't think that will change.
Still, it's worth mentioning that Alertle does have something unique to offer - an autoplay option. With this feature, you can click a button and your feeds play like a slideshow. You can customize the delay between items from 2 seconds to 2 minutes. (This would be a great feature to have in Google Reader!)
But in the end, Alertle won't be likely to lure you away from whatever services you're using now. Still, you might want to show it to mom and dad.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
The welcome email had my plain text password in it. Ick. Other than that, it's relatively interesting :)
Posted by: Udi | February 8, 2008 2:56 PMUnfortunately, one major limiting factor for "mainstream" users that you probably should have mentioned is that they don't support IE just yet, although they claim that "Support for Internet Explorer is currently in the works".
Posted by: James Dellow | February 8, 2008 6:27 PMShame on them for not having IE compatilibility. For a site that's targeted at mainstream users, it's not acceptable to launch without catering to the dominant browser.
Posted by: James Yu | February 9, 2008 1:56 PMHi
I'm one of the geeks behind Alertle !
While Alertle might appeal to mainstream users, it does give Google Reader a run for its money. Here's a detailed write up on why: http://blog.alertle.com/?p=10
I'm very interested in figuring out that why would anyone want to use Google Reader since Alertle is now available ? :)
Posted by: Varun Mathur | February 10, 2008 1:46 AMWhy don't we support IE as yet?
1. Fyi, there have been over 400 million Firefox downloads as of September 2007 and growing fast.
2. Our strategy was to get Alertle out asap. The early adopters have statistically been the tech community which are quite known for using the Firefox browser and they are more active in providing feedback. This helps us streamline our processes and to gear up for the bigger market.
Our IE compatible version will be out soon. So for all the IE supporters out there, please hang on!
Thanks
Karan
Posted by: Karan Aurora | February 10, 2008 1:51 AMLike others said, disappointing it doesn't support IE, especially as it's getting its standards support together.
It's doesn't support Opera either, even if I try to ID as firefox.
Firefox may well have 400 million downloads, but it still scrapes less than 10% on the site I work on which gets over 100,000 visitors a month.
It seems like an odd outdated web dev attitude to have in todays world.
Posted by: Tom | February 11, 2008 9:04 AMWe do realize that IE support is important; however, we had the version for Firefox ready to go live, and we decided to launch it instead of keeping it in wraps till we developed the IE version. However, for this release we do assume that most people that know about RSS also know that Firefox is a better browser than IE, but it doesn't mean that we won't target the IE users quite soon.
This is the first in a series of upcoming releases of Alertle!
Rahul R
Posted by: Rahul R | February 11, 2008 4:26 PMWhile many consider me a first adopter, I do have specific criteria I look for in a web application. The most significant being the flexibility, or adaptability of the web application to my needs.
I will try Alertle, but I have a feeling that it is too cumbersome and regimented for my needs. One Alertle feature made me venture that opinion, and it is the auto-subscription feature. Isn't the goal of an rss feed aggregator to organize the feeds in such a way that a person can quickly and efficiently access their feeds?
Think of it. I will automatically be signed up for over 1000 rss feeds. Hmmm, I don't think so.
Most of the sites mentioned are not ones that jump out to me as being original or even unique, so I may not be interested. I want primary source rss feeds, not filtered secondary sources that may or may not tell all the REAL news.
Yes, I do use Firefox. I will check out Alertle. I will report back on my evaluation.
Posted by: samccoy | February 13, 2008 2:57 PM