Editor's note: This post was amended to reflect a later release date for this app. My6Sense for the iPhone was originally expected to be on the app store Thursday morning, although it remains in Apple's approval process. For the purpose of this review I was using the same version which was installed using a testing provision.
My6Sense, a company that previewed its RSS recommendation technology at the Under the Radar Mobility conference back in late November, is finally ready to get its tools into the hands of users. The company soon plans to release its first native application for mobile phones (currently for the iPhone only), which pulls in RSS feeds and adjusts what it presents based on your reading habits.
To make those adjustments, the product revolves around a machine learning algorithm called "digital intuition." As you read, it slowly builds a profile for recommendations on other items you should check out, and ranks them accordingly.
There are six levels of digital intuition in all. Any time you check for recommendations it updates a small bar that tells you how far along its cold, robot brain is to knowing your deepest reading desires. In the hour or two I spent with the app, I nearly got to level three. Apparently it takes much more browsing than I was willing to give it before it could offer expert recommendations. Nonetheless, after just that short amount of time it was doing a pretty good job pointing me toward articles I did, in fact, want to read.
Feeding frenzy
Finding feeds to begin with is quite easy. You can enter URLs manually, download packs of RSS links that have been curated by My6Sense, or import the news feed from places like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and Flickr. It's also got a tool for grabbing your feed collection from other RSS services like Google Reader, My Yahoo, NewsGator, and Netvibes. I just used my feed collection from Google Reader, which was as simple as plugging in the credentials for my Google account. My6Sense was even nice enough to keep all my folders and meticulous feed organization intact.
Now the real heart of the app is feed reading. My6Sense wants you to give up using any other readers, and do everything inside of its app, since that's what makes its recommendation engine tick. This would be fine, except for the fact that the app can get intolerably slow when it comes to loading headlines.
Over a healthy 3G connection it took around 12 seconds to load up a list of just 10 stories. It took even longer to pull in an additional 10 results. And this was just the text--images don't load until you open up a story to read. In comparison, Google Reader in Safari is not... Read more
In an effort to make Google Reader more approachable, Google has put out a series of help videos that show people how to use it. There are only two clips to start out with (posted below) which cover basics like adding and reading feeds, and using the tool's sharing features. Google says future videos will cover some of the more advanced features.
Google's efforts are notably overshadowed by YouTube users who have taken it upon themselves to create screencasts similar to the ones made for last year's YouTube help video challenge. How-to site ExpertVillage in particular has 16 different clips, while Web guru Ed Dale has put together a three-part, half-hour series about how to use it.
One thing to note is that Google's videos cover some of the changes made since the redesign in early December. See also our Newbie's Guide for Google Reader, which despite being written in late 2007 is still remarkably up to date.
I've put the second how-to video after the break.
... Read more
Web-based RSS feed aggregator Spreed is casual reading's worst enemy. A speed-reader extraordinaire like Robert Scoble might enjoy it as a way to dig through even more stories a day, but at its heart it's kind of like visiting an aquarium with one of those moving sidewalks; you're still seeing what you came there to see--you just don't have the luxury of taking your time.
Time is actually the key focus of Spreed. It centers on a speed-reading player that will only show you three or four words of a story at a time, and in rapid succession. As your reading skills improve you can ramp up the number of words per minute it shows you, letting you speed-read any story at whatever level you're capable of. Sure you could do this on your own, but Spreed forces you to look at nothing else but the words, making reading a distraction-free, yet slightly anxiety-inducing experience.
Like Netvibes, My Yahoo and others, Spreed has a built-in directory of RSS feeds you can subscribe to. What makes it neat is that it gives you a estimation of how long it will take to go through a story based on its length and your current WPM setting. It also shows you the time it thinks it would take you to read the story when not in speed-read mode, along with a link in between the two to jump to the site itself. You can even plug in Microsoft Word documents, effectively making it a free speed-reading training tool.
In addition to the desktop flavor, Spreed has an iPhone variation that will let you access your bookmarked feeds and read them using the same speed viewer. It too has a quick WPM selector in case you want to dial it up a notch.
Ideally in the future Spreed could come out with a browser plug-in or bookmarklet that will take any story or RSS entry and run it through its player, letting you use a more capable RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines to add in some of the features it's missing like link sharing, folders, and favoriting.
[via SimpleSpark]
Spreed takes full RSS feeds and makes them easy to parse with a speed-reading player. You can tweak how many words per minute you want to read at and it will adjust accordingly. (click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Of the several news readers offered in Apple's iTunes App Store to date, NetNewsWire stands out as the most appealing. Unlike Mobile News from the Associated Press, NetNewsWire pulls in stories from multiple sources, and unlike Google Reader, it does so nearly instantly in a true native application (Google Readers whisks you to an iPhone-optimized Web application after you select it from a list of more options on Google Mobile.)
Like many other applications, NetNewsWire is the iPhone version of an already-brawny Web service operated by NewsGator, and one whose desktop versions CNET Download.com editors have already acclaimed for its usability on Macs and on PCs, where it's known as FeedDemon.
NetNewsWire for iPhone is a feeds repository, but a good one. You won't be able to add feeds at this early stage, but the application will syncs with any of your existing NewsGator accounts for NetNewsWire for Macintosh, FeedDemon, Inbox, and NewsGator Online. The application lets new users to sign up from the iPhone. You'll also be able to save posts in a clippings folder for later perusal, and read the full article on Safari.
Love RSS feeds but are generally unhappy about the structured systems that let you browse them? You might like Feedly, a very nontraditional approach to viewing your favorite feeds that ends up feeling a lot like portal news sites of yore, but with a tight-knit social network built in to help you discover and share new content with friends.
The service, which is currently Firefox-only (how convenient) and requires you to install a small browser plug-in, will slurp up your bookmarks, social networking log-ins, news preferences, and an entire OPML file and will organize it on to various news pages.
The result is something some have coined as Yahoo 2.0, with each area of interest set up as its own news section--complete with top stories that change throughout the day.
You can read entire articles and feeds without having to visit the source site. For the purists, there's also a simple button you can click to bring up each article in a light boxed window on top of the feed. In fact, there are several ways to view content, either with large thumbnails and abstracts, or just headlines. My personal favorite is ... Read more
Google upgraded its Reader product yesterday with a handful of important new features that let people share content with anyone from any Web site.
Previously its sharing features were confined to whatever RSS feeds you were subscribed to. As a solution to this problem, Google has created a small bookmarklet users can add to their browser's toolbar to simply share whatever page they're looking at to their shared items feed. Users can also attach personal notes on these, or any other shared items in a similar fashion to Facebook's share or Tumblr's ReBlog implementation, which lets you add your own take on a link then post it to your blog with about two clicks.
Click to try it.
The company has also significantly improved personalization of people's share pages, letting them choose from one of four themes. Each theme gives the share page a different header while the rest of the design stays the same. I'm assuming the company will add more extensive customizations later on considering people's gReader share pages are becoming a modified version of Blogger.com pages.
Speaking of blogging, one of the more interesting side effects of the new changes is that Google is now offering some Twitter-like functionality to people's reader pages. From the notes page in Google Reader you can simply type in whatever text you want and hit publish. The note will then go out to your shared items blog with a little quote bubble. However, unlike microblogging services there are no limits on length, and you can even drop in full HTML to add links, photos and page formatting. It's certainly a poor-man's blogging solution compared with a service like Wordpress or Blogger, but if you were so inclined you could use it as lightweight platform to reshare content you discover while checking your feeds.
Want to use Google Reader as a blogging platform? Go for it. You can write little notes or drop in full HTML.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
It's no secret we're Google Reader users here at Webware. We've got a Newbie's Guide for it, and wholly recommend it to folks who want a simple feed-reading experience. That said the product is not without its faults. Earlier today we got a pitch from a cool new service called Favorit that's definitely gunning to take some market share away from Google and other Web based RSS readers. The good news is that it's got a lot of things going for it that others do not.
First things first, Favorit does all the usual things you'd expect--pulling in RSS feeds, providing a directory of new feeds, and giving you tools to share stories you like with others. But that's not what makes it different. Favorit is linked up with Disqus, a universal community discussion service we covered when it launched back in October. This means you can comment on any story on a Disqus-enabled blog right in the reader, and have it show up alongside the rest of the comments on the original story page. Compared with Google Reader, which only shows you how many comments a story has, you can actually read through comments like their own little feed--right in the reader.
That's not the coolest part, though. Favorit is set up like ReadBurner and Streamy to figure out what stories are hot, then promote them to a various hot topic pages. Each story features buttons to vote the content up or down, and even bothers to keeps track of how a story's been voted on. The system employs a small chart that evaluates those votes combined with user attention (time spent reading it) over the past 36 hours. If there were more users taking advantage of the service, it would be a fun way to track the timeline of how the popular stories get hot, similar to that cool DiggCharts visualization we checked out back in May (on a side note, DiggCharts is DOA).
Track how much interest a story's getting both in user votes and readership. A feature that would work well if more people were using the service.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Besides the comments and popular stories, Favorit has taken a nice open approach to sharing stories with others. Like Google Reader you get your own RSS feed of shared stories. You can also add other users' shared story boxes (called "slices") where you can add stories you think they'd like or set it up to automatically grab stories using Boolean values--it's like setting up a smart playlist in iTunes. Additionally Favorit incorporates several popular social publishing mediums, letting you post stories straight to Twitter, WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal.
While I found Favorit to be a little less user friendly than Google Reader when it comes to adding feeds, the reading system is off to a good start. Browsing stories is very user friendly, and Google Reader users will feel right at home with similar keyboard shortcuts and tools to discover new feeds. Where the system currently falls apart is the OPML importing, and subscribing to feeds--the latter of which is nowhere to be seen. You can find feeds by searching for them and browsing the directory, but there's not a clear and easy subscribe button anywhere--something I hope will be amended.
The service is in private beta for the time being, although the creators were kind enough to provide us 200 invites for Webware readers. To manage this we've set up a form after the break and will be giving the first 200 to sign-up access.
Update: Invitations are now used up. Thanks to everyone who signed up. We'll be delivering your invites early next week, so keep an eye on your inbox.
Update 3/6: Invitations have been sent out to everyone who registered on the form. The handy bulk inviter let me know that a bunch of you already got your invites from elsewhere. Be sure to check your spam box in case you're wondering where yours are.
I'm not going to beat around the bush here, Streamy is a Web service I've been looking forward to getting my hands on for some time now. Well, to be exact, it's been just more than a month since I first heard about it, from a mysterious YouTube video that caught my attention. I was lucky enough to get an invite to the still-private service earlier today. I've been testing it for the last hour or so and am already impressed. Not because it looks really flashy (which it does), but because it has the groundwork for a very socialized surfing experience without requiring you to install a new Web browser, or discontinue using services you're already familiar with.
In a nutshell, the service is a hybrid between Digg, Facebook, your favorite instant-messaging client, Google Reader, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. By its very name, Streamy is a mashup service. It pulls together a variety of your social streams: be it your favorite blog feeds, news alerts, or friends updates, and rolls them up into a slick package.
On the social networking and bookmarking side of things, every user gets a profile and an online presence. You can fill the profile with all sorts of information about yourself, but the real clincher here is a listing of what feeds you're subscribed to and groups you've joined. The feed reader itself lets you subscribe to as many RSS feeds as you'd like and view them all without having to leave the page. If there's any embedded content like video or music players, that comes along for the ride too.
If you find anything interesting while browsing, you can share it in several ways. There's the typical "e-mail this" option and quick links to publish it to the Streamy community, to a group you're a member of, or your friends. Much of the interface is drag and drop, and as an "aha!" moment earlier, I shared something with another Streamy user by simply dragging a story headline onto their buddy icon. Cool.
I intend on giving Streamy some more of my time to really get a feel for how it handles a huge influx of feed subscriptions and a growing user base as the service opens up. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the interface. There are several more after the jump, so be sure to click the "read more" link below.
The front page of Streamy shows off the hottest stories of the day, along with story recommendations for you based on your RSS subscriptions and what you've clicked on.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Here's a new service I can't wait to use--in part for its good looks, and also for its attempt at combining several different news and social services together in a user-friendly manner. It's called Streamy, and the easiest way to describe it is a mashup of Google Reader, Meebo, Del.icio.us and Twitter. The emphasis however, is on Web content, and how to make it both easy to read and share with others.
Like AOL's Mgnet, which I took a look at yesterday, Streamy provides customized newsfeeds based on your interests and viewing habits. You can build up your own set of RSS feeds and see what your friends are up to in real time. There's also a built-in IM component to let you chat and share story links without leaving the site. Streamy has its own proprietary IM network for Streamy users, but it also lets users log in to other IM networks like AIM.
The front page of Streamy gets its stories from the most-read items by Streamy users. In that regard, it's similar to Spotplex [review], although from the looks of the preview screencast, it offers a whole lot more.
No word yet on when Streamy will be opened up to the public. In the meantime there's a defunct signup page, and a whole lot of blue.
This morning AOL launched myAOL, a group of three services wrapped up into one customizable page. MyAOL is made up of three services: myPage, a customizable start page akin to Pageflakes or Netvibes; Mgnet--an audiovisual mashup of news; and Favorites--which for all intents and purposes is a Web-based RSS reader. All three offer various ways of browsing, reading, and discovering news and Web content.
Since most users are already familiar with the concepts of myPage and Favorites, the real surprise here is Mgnet. This is one of the cooler things I've seen lately, and somewhat similar to Google's recently released Google News image browser. Users can pick out topics they like or are interested in, and Mgnet will pull up a small array of images linked up with story headlines. Clicking one brings up the story description in a separate pane, and users are able to vote it up or down (a la Reddit) as well as see related news stories (which are powered by Sphere).
Pick your favorite topics from a simple mosaic of icons and Mgnet will serve up matching content.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
In addition to providing stories it thinks you'll be interested in, Mgnet also keeps track of "what's hot," a small list of the most-clicked and voted-on stories. I found this more interesting than the actual AOL front page, since it's a little more visually stimulating. The one missing piece in this system is a way to see how user voting is affecting each story, something AOL will likely add later down the line.
Favorites is also impressive. As an RSS reader it's well-equipped. There's a fairly extensive listing of prepicked feeds from a variety of Web sites. There's also the option to add your own feeds, either with a straight RSS address, or by searching by URL. To keep track of your various feeds, you can set up folders, a little bit like Google Reader. You can also go in and reorder feeds with simple dragging and dropping. The one missing piece is a trashcan to delete feeds you don't want anymore, which instead is handled in a separate feeds manager.
AOL's got a pretty solid lineup of Web apps in one spot with myAOL. What it lacks in true originality, it makes up for in execution, as all three services are simple to use and feature-rich.
See more screens below.
... Read more
