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Promising: NewsAlloy

NewsAlloy ScreenshotI’ve been pining for a great UI in a free online RSS/Atom reader… my pining days may be over. NewsAlloy is a newish Ajax-enabled aggregator that seems to have been heavily inspired by the GMail interface. In other words: clean and intuitive. In other words: Ironically unlike Google’s own Reader.

The NewsAlloy site took a big hit this weekend when it got TechCrunched (AKA the new Slashdotted?), but it seems to have recovered well enough to be mostly usable again.

First impressions:
1) Speed is everything. TechCrunch reported it as “fast,” but right now it simply isn’t fast. Usable, but not fast. They need to regain their speed to be a player.

2) HTML rendering is mandatory. So far I’m only seeing plain text for item content. Some of my favorite feeds need the markup to be readable.

If these can be addressed, my default reader has just been replaced.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 22:07 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Responses to “Promising: NewsAlloy”

  1. lordtime Says:
    January 31st, 2006 at 08:28

    Hi!

    just adjust your options and html will appear :) also take look to right expand bars to see html content in items

    also speed is restored :) slowdown was happened due to mass opml uploads by new users

    thanks!

  2. Rob Fay Says:
    January 31st, 2006 at 14:41

    Disconcerting to see a number of typos, but I guess that’s what you get since it’s in beta.

    Is “pinning” a universal term? Can I assume it is synonymous with flagging as important or adding a star as Gmail does?

  3. Mark Woodman Says:
    January 31st, 2006 at 16:19

    I believe the creators don’t speak English as their first language. NewsAlloy will definitely benefit from a spell checker and language-specific help files written by native speakers.

    It would appear that the trick to viewing the HTML of items is to set Settings –> Items Text Size = None. (Not very intuitive.)

    And, it looks like the speed is back. I’m loving it.

    “Pinned” is the GMail equivalent to “Starred”… if you look at the Javascript link, you’ll see it is still called “starred” under the covers.

  4. Rob Fay Says:
    February 2nd, 2006 at 12:31

    Have you checked out FeedLounge? Unfortunately, it is a pay-to-play app but it too looks promising.

  5. lordtime Says:
    February 4th, 2006 at 10:56

    Well , thanks for feeback guys, i’m really ovebusy and i know that i need to spellcheck the site :) just need a time, so forgive me this .. still beta! very bery soon it will be moved to RC state (in a week or so)!

    i tried demo of FeedLounge :)
    Of course you decide but all i can say about FL its nice in interface but not for me very poor in features

  6. Rob Fay Says:
    February 7th, 2006 at 17:02

    LordTime,

    I’ve moved my feeds over to your product and have been pretty impressed. I look forward to the addition of tags and wonder how you’ll use them.

  7. Mark Woodman Says:
    February 7th, 2006 at 17:55

    Look for the tag icon at the bottom of a feed item… looks like you will be able to add a tag soonish.