Comments for

Guzzle.it: A Personalized News Dashboard for Any & All Topics You Love

2009-07-14T22:00:00Z

Another day, another way to find, sort, and digest the firehose of online content. Right?

This time, we bring you something very exciting. Guzzle.it is one of the cleanest, coolest, most intuitive, most customizable news dashboards we've seen. It's lightning fast to set up and makes finding and reading news and blog posts that are hyper-relevant very easy, indeed. It reminds us of a more personalized Alltop or one of the nifty, custom-built dashboards a tech journalist might have. Best of all, it allows for multiple fields of interest and creative layouts. Guzzle.it just might change how you read the Internet.

]]> Without any account creation required, users are invited to search for topics. Keywords are suggested when appropriate. Users can group as many topics as they like or use separators to segregate different types of content.

For example, I decided to sign up for news on tech, design, and rock & roll. I dragged, dropped, and renamed the topics and separators until I had the page layout that I thought would suit me best.

The initial page design I got was scannable, legible, digestible. Within seconds, I'd found out that Robert Plant was knighted, a whole bunch of really great fonts were available free on one website, and a post I wrote about startups was topping the charts for articles on entrepreneurs.

Awesome so far, no? But it gets even better.

I clicked on the gear icons next to each topic and found I had even more options to customize the look and feel of my news dashboard. As you can see, image views are available, and expanded views (for topics with more information than will fit into a single column) allow for extended reading.

Of course, we do have a features wishlist for the site. We want a mobile app, and we want to be able to have more control over article and post sources. Since the user interface is so carefully crafted, we'd like to see a few themes or more graphics customization. While we're on graphics, with the cool image view option already in place, why not have image searches, or searches for other kinds of multimedia content? Also, we'd like to be able to see the content author, when available; and we definitely would like to see more blogs added to the curated list here. Finally, while most of the posts and articles returned for each topic were spot-on, there were a few oddballs (a crime story filed under "fonts" and a Microsoft story in "startups" come to mind).

Nevertheless, it's prettily put-together and a great offering overall. We suggest you give it a shot, and please leave your feedback in the comments!

Comment from Justin Alcon on 2009-07-14

2009-07-14T22:18:49Z

There has got to be a better name for this, unless this is for porn.

Comment from Joseph on 2009-07-14

2009-07-14T22:43:10Z

This looks really cool indeed. As you said, a more customizable version of alltop.

Just might have to give this a shot!

Comment from Imran Ali on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T13:10:06Z

Ensembli is also seeking to tackle the same market... 'RSS for the rest of us'.

Guzzle.it's done a great job with design and UX, but the results are patchy...I'd be interested to see what kinda intelligence is under the hood.

We'd really welcome some comparison between our newly redesigned and relaunched Ensembli (http://www.ensembli.com) and Guzzle.it :)

Comment from Madomausu on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T15:30:22Z

Cool site, but goodness, somebody might want to let them know that it is considered in poor taste to include user passwords in your plain text registration confirmation email!

Comment from Richard on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T15:37:16Z

You might have saved me thirty wasted seconds by noting in your article that it doesn't support Internet Explorer, only Firefox and Safari.

Comment from Kwingon on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T19:16:22Z

Actually it only doesn't support IE6.

Comment from Simon on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T21:01:09Z

You see, I look at Alltop and now this and wonder - how is this any better than netvibes.com?! It's done all this for a while, for free, and does a whole lot more too...

Comment from Web Hosting on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T22:18:42Z

One more nice alternative for a news reader. Hope they get to add more features

Comment from Bitou on 2009-07-23

2009-07-23T09:53:58Z

Interesting idea but sources are mixed all together and often not interesting...

I wish i could find something "really serious" and more specialized :(

Comment from BB on 2009-07-24

2009-07-24T09:27:50Z

Doesn't support Firefox 2 either. Firefox 2 is a modern browser which respects standards. Come on, should we really have to upgrade browsers every 6 months to be able to access websites?

Fail.

Comment from sikis hikayeleri on 2010-04-12

2010-04-12T21:10:38Z

How could we bilieve that the time of 'Web 3.0' is coming?
Wolfram Alpha just launched, but we don't know what will happen in the search engine world.
It seems that twitter conquers everywhere. But it truly change my life?? NO.
Many widgets come and gone

Comment from thesunshining on 2010-11-08

2010-11-08T19:21:06Z

Hi, today is a beautiful day in my life. I saw a first snow in this year and I save this photo for all people in the World!

Comment from xingtai123 on 2011-05-31

2011-06-01T05:50:15Z

Without any account shenshou creation required, users are invited to search for jiaomai topics. Keywords are suggested when appropriate. Users can group as many topics as they like or use qinpian separators to segregate different types of content.