beta: feeds2.com

Posted on | June 15, 2006 | 1 Comment

my feeds2.com-beta-account has just been activated (thx to nicholas, CEO of GTP). feeds2.com is an ajax-based online-feed-reader developed by greek company GTP solutions (they were showcasing at innovate 2006 and got mentioned on techcrunch recently).

feeds2 imports opml-feeds via file-upload and URL, making it easy to migrate from other standards-based readers like bloglines. the user-interface looks similar to those of competing products, displaying the hierarchical list of subscriptions on the left and the actual feed-content in the middle (GTP utilizes revenue via advertising, so the right column contains google-ads). the most outstanding feature of feeds2 is its personalization engine: users are encouraged to indicate if they like or dislike the content of any particular post. based on these assertions, an algorithm is sorting posts for relevancy – this could be quite a timesaver, especially for people following tons of feeds. GTP also seems to work on an innovative visual browsing-mode, which displays feeds in a mindmap-kindof-way:

some minor details which can be easily fixed until going public:

• the basic reader-functions need improvement (f.e. marking posts as ‘read’ seems to miss)
• the line-height is to narrow for convenient & fast reading
• feeds2 tries to auto-generate tags from the post’s body-text based on word-frequency – at the moment this leads to meaningless tags like “don’t”, “says” or “what’s”
• some feeds are displayed without inline-images (f.e. retrothing)
• ajax is used in too many places, I’ld prefer navigating the site using oldschool http.

I think feeds2 could become a potential alternative to the established readers (check this comparison of 9 products at techcrunch!) if GTP focuses on the unique personalization-features. it’s also noteworthy that feeds2 is already available in english, spanish, italian and greek.

 

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