FeedEachother Releases Smart, Social RSS Reader
If you got excited about Streamy, the feature rich super-social RSS reader that made the rounds among the review blogs last month (see our review), then you should check out FeedEachother. Unlike Streamy, FeedEachother is open today for anyone to use.
Think the RSS reader market is all wrapped up? While major market share may not be redistributed any time soon, these edge-case feed readers offer some interesting innovations and could serve your needs better than the big guys. Read on for a summary of what FeedEachother does very well.
FeedEachother was built by a former developer from Yahoo! Answers and another now at craft social network Etsy. It's easy to tell that these guys have backgrounds in some of the leading projects on the web today because they have obviously been paying attention to discussions online and have executed well in designing their feed reader accordingly. The interface will feel very familiar to anyone who uses Facebook or Google Reader. (See screenshot below.) The service does a good job of communicating for novice users while offering a feature set that power users will really like.
Here's what's cool about FeedEachother:
- It recommends feeds "similar" to the ones you're subscribed to. Recommendation engines are a key way to leverage the network effect of distributed nodes of knowledge - ala social apps online. Big value there for discovery of high value information sources.
- Sharing notes and items. It's like a combination of Google Reader's shared items feature with commenting - the only thing better would be to post comments inside from FeedEachother back out to the blog posts being read by feed. That would be great.
- Comments are readable. This is really cool; if a blog post you're reading by feed has comments, with a single click FeedEachother will fetch and display them inline with AJAX.
- Multiple kinds of relationships are possible. This is a socially oriented service - so you're supposed to make friends with other users and share information with them. Unlike many other social services, though, FeedEachother lets you designate a contact as a co-worker, family, friend or member of any other group you create. Shared items can then be sent to one group instead of to everyone.
- OPML sharing. When you find people whose shared items you admire - you can download their OPML file of publicly visible feeds in one click. That's awesome.
FeedEachother looks well put together already on its first day of public availability. The only shortcomings I've seen so far are the absence of offline and mobile modes, weaker analytics than Google Reader offers and a limit of 500 feeds by OPML import. Those problems are big enough that I'm not likely to use FeedEachother, but I do hope that someday I'll change my mind. I love seeing innovation in the RSS tools space.
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Another excellent post!
I think the internet at large is still waiting for that breakthrough Feed subscription product that will blow the doors off of RSS.
I think some people are still struggling with the definition of blog.
This looks like a great app. Could definitely use some UI help, but I understand it's tough to invest in design when the audience is used to free [readers].
Thanks guys for your comments. I agree Derek that this won't be the app that blows everything open, at least as it stands, but I think it's pretty cool.
Aaron, I think the UI is actually pretty good. If you look around it there are some nice little touches throughout, like collapsable sections of the page and multiple pointers to the OPML import link. Hmmmm... :) well, we'll see.
Shame - this is what I got, will try again another day,
keith
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
I had trouble uploading my OPML file, but they have a direct import from Google Reader that sort of works. Unfortunately, it doesn't maintain your tagging in any fashion.
I'd love to give them a better try, but I'm not willing to invest the time to reorganize my imported feeds. Too bad, I like the idea of reading comments directly in my reader.
Cool post on RSS, you can find useful information.
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Wine Societies, a new, one of a kind, destination site for wine culture and marketplace.
Thanks for the wonderful review Marshall.
Just a note about the bit of downtime and the import problems mentioned in the comments above. We weren't expecting such an influx of traffic so early on, but everything looks to be sorted out now. If you had trouble before, please try again and accept my apologies.
Thanks!
Udi
ps - Arrington, if you're reading this, please hold off... ;)
I think this guy, Udi, is a genius.
Well well, this is something that i really like.
The UI is excellent!
I like the social interaction model they have as well.
The only thing i am having problem is the non-differentiation of new items and old items.
When i click a feed for example i don't want to see all the items, just the new ones.
If done correctly and updated regularly this app has potential.
Well done Udi. :D
Udi, I hate you. I'm currently going through the motions of getting funding for something that addresses the same problem in a very similar way. I hate you! (though I must thank you for showing my potential investors that it's worth doing) :)
I like FeedEachother and looks pretty good.
NEooWS.com (http://www.neoows.com) was the first site I saw last year that came up with the RSS + Social Networking combo.