NewsBlur (YC S12) Takes Feed Reading Back To Its Basics | Hacker News Reader

NewsBlur (YC S12) Takes Feed Reading Back To Its Basics

techcrunch.com

131 pointsconesus38 comments

Thrilled to be launching NewsBlur's social features. NewsBlur has become something much bigger than what I ever thought possible when I wrote the first line of code in June 2009 in the New York City underground.

We're now two people and YC-backed. We have so many new big features coming down the pipeline. An iPad app, an updated iPhone app, an Android app, all first-class experiences.

This is the launch of Blurblogs. This is my blurblog: http://samuel.newsblur.com.

Congrats on the funding and the new launch!

The article mentions that the product is freemium, but I don't see the upgrade options I remember seeing when I tried Newsblur a couple times earlier. Have you removed the paid version?

We just don't shove it in your face. We're absolutely still freemium and we show you the upsell when you first create an account. After that, once you hit 64 sites, the limit at which freemium kicks in.

Otherwise, you can go to "Choose your 64 sites" under the Manage menu. We will make it clearer on the dashboard later today. Thanks for the very useful feedback!

I never felt like you were shoving it in my face. But, good to know you've still got the paid version.

Small bug report - When I connected my Google Reader account, the progress wheel in the popup window kept spinning indefinitely. If it didn't look so funky, I would have got bored sooner. Anyway, it imported my feeds fine when I reloaded the site, but I thought I should let you know about the glitch.

I love the fact the you choose not to 'shove it in your face' wrt the paid options.

My personal belief is that if your users love what you've created, they will adopt it and then be happy to pay for it. In comparison, giving them multiple paid options at sign-up is kind off the wrong idea as your user has not had the chance to experience and understand your product.

Newsblur looks good; am going to give it a good try.

I think you should make this clear somewhere on the site - that only the initial 64 feeds are free and then you need to upgrade. If its already present in the FAQ section or such, its not very obvious / easily accessible.

This could avoid scenarios where the user might be surprised later on. That's just what I think. I'm pretty sure you'll get mixed feedback on shoving/not shoving the pricing in the user's face.

Your free is also not as timely updating as say Google Reader updates. Hence I never kept up with this service because time is money and when you don't get RSS updates on time (especially when you have a context to compare against) you can't really be a happy camper as a free user.

Blurblogs look great! A couple polish points:

* You should set a <title>.

* The site header ("Mission Mission") for the Sutro Tower GIF post is just low-contrast enough to be difficult to read on bad displays. Maybe you should up the contrast threshold on the algorithm you use to select colors.

* Consider collapsing comment sections by default. If Blurblogs take off, it's going to be irritating to scroll past comments for popular posts.

Yeah, the titles on blurblogs broke in the transition. Will be fixed momentarily.

And if blurblogs take off, we will be collapsing comments from "public", but no need to limit growth now when we need it most. But we are planning to limit the height of the story content if it's more than a page-height long.

Also, I can't emphasize this enough, but you should follow NewsBlur's development on GitHub: http://github.com/samuelclay.

NewsBlur is open-source for a few good reasons:

1. NewsBlur makes money off hosting

2. NewsBlur greatest benefit is its network

3. Giving back to the open-source community is in my blood, considering my work with DocumentCloud.

I invite you to use the code for your own benefit. It's Python and JavaScript, with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis as backends.

Will you keep making the source code available in a free software license in the upcoming iterations? Is the YC investment likely to cause any change in this regard?

I'm happy that you're able to work much more freely on NewsBlur, but as an early premium user, the investment did get me mildly worried about the future of my beloved app that a handful of dedicated people used, and was very well cared for by one guy I trusted my data and workflow with.

My uneducated and selfish hunch for NB's ideal future is one where you keep charging a much larger amount of users (and possibly charge more), avoid any further investment of the VC kind, and continue keeping the latest production source available under a free license.

The intention is to keep NewsBlur open-source. We'll see how that goes. The other intention is to never have to raise more money, but we'll see how that goes. I have big plans for what I want to build, but to do it, I need seed funding. After that, my hope is to never raise again and have premiums pay for the service. Today, that is not possible. But we're at a tipping point that I think we can juice.

> The intention is to keep NewsBlur open-source. We'll see how that goes.

Do you mean with the investors? Do you perceive or foresee pressure from YC against keeping it open source, or do you believe there will be a shift of incentives (such as the practicality of hosting and sharing no longer being your focus of value for paid service) or technicalities that might prevent you from keeping the code open in the future NewsBlur?

As the continuous availability of the source code is critical in my choosing to use and pay for NewsBlur (and I assume this is the case for a few other users on HN), I'd appreciate any details you can share in this regard.

> I have big plans for what I want to build, but to do it, I need seed funding. After that, my hope is to never raise again and have premiums pay for the service.

Happy to know that's your intention.

I was working on a (now-shuttered) startup in this space. Almost universally people's favorite feature was seeing the live website. I had also built in a reading queue into the application, the idea being that you could do inbox-zero with your feeds if you could process them extremely fast.

I talked to a bunch of largely non-technical RSS power users and discovered that the people who really use RSS readers are subscribed to 1500+ feeds and barely scratch the surface of reading everything in them.

It was really disheartening to discover my fundamental premise was wrong, and at the same time my now-cofounder contacted me with a great idea with a clearly underserved market so I abandoned the solo effort for that.

I think there's a ton of room for innovation in the media reader space, so I wish NewsBlur luck!

> I talked to a bunch of largely non-technical RSS power users and discovered that the people who really use RSS readers are subscribed to 1500+ feeds and barely scratch the surface of reading everything in them.

That is an interesting finding, in its own right. When Google neutered Google Reader's sharing features, "sharebros" started an "I am the 1000+" campaign (as a play on the "I am the 99%"). To me, that suggests having 1000+ unread feed items is common enough to be a viral joke.

There may be a business opportunity for helping people find the wheat from the chaff in their 1000+ feeds.

That's one of the tenets of NewsBlur -- by using NewsBlur's training filters, you can hide stories you don't want to see while highlighting the stories you want to focus on.

As the other reply says, that is what news blur is trying to do and i think it is the right way to go.

I had, but never got to try, an idea to only show users a small percent of the articles. Then, since metainbox was designed for quick triaging, you could show people more articles based on what other people read or queued. It would allow the "curation" to be done by more people

I've been watching NewsBlur for a while now, even exchanging a few emails with Sam. He's a first class guy and I'm excited to see what he can do with NewsBlur. Congrats on the launch!

This is barely related to the actual article, and only occurred to me because I was excited by the name "NewsBlur", but then discovered that it isn't necessarily news-related.

Are there any startups doing interesting stuff with news, journalism or any of the like? I've seen a lot of services that will aggregate the links your Twitter friends are posting and so on, but I'm more interested in the actual reporting itself.

There are some interesting things happening on the reporting side: data analysis, drone usage, citizen-sourced journalism, and more.

However, I believe the most interesting things right now are happening on the news monetization side. News outlets are desperate to find a solution to continue the work they do.

While lots of folks are creating aggregators (this one looks great), it's not hard to make a news aggregator that looks and feels nicer than a newspaper (step 1: No ads. Look how much nicer it looks already!). The far harder part seems to be figuring out how to pay for great content.

Two I know of: http://blottr.com - Has huge traffic and reports early.

http://Orchive.com - New company I heard of recently with no traction yet.

Check out my version of a Blurblog, I styled it a little differently: http://roy.newsblur.com

On the roadmap, theming and letting people really make their Blurblog their own.

Full disclosure, I am 2 of 2 at NewsBlur!

I just announced the addition of Roy as a co-founder on the NewsBlur Blog: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurbl.... Roy is working on the iOS apps and has been instrumental in shaping NewsBlur's future. He also can put up with me for 14 hours a day, which is no small feat.

So as a heavy Google Reader user (processing about 300 articles a day), can someone sum up the advantages to switching to NewsBlur? It's not entirely clear from this article or the NewsBlur site. Or perhaps its target audience is not me?

Yeah, I'd say you are definitely the target audience. NewsBlur does three things better than Google Reader:

- News reading: With first-class iOS, Android, and web apps, NewsBlur is an easy and organized way to read the news wherever you are. There is also an Original view that shows you the original website. You have to see it to believe it.

- Training: By using NewsBlur's training filters, you can hide stories you don't want to see while highlighting the stories you want to focus on.

- Social: Sharing and talking about the news is not only fun, but allows you to break out of your filter bubble and embrace the serendipity of your friend's tastes.

Also, NewsBlur's being actively developed, so that's a huge plus.

Congrats - does the funding affect plans to continue open-source development?

Not as far as I can help it. NewsBlur makes money through hosting. And our competitive edge is the network. Giving back to the open-source community is in my blood, especially after my work on DocumentCloud.

awesome. thanks

First off congrats to the Newsblur guys. I am a big fan. One thing that I would really like to see is some sort of sharing feature akin to Google Reader's old "shared items".

You bet, that's what we just launched. Here's my blurblog: http://samuel.newsblur.com. You can share directly from a blurblog or in the Feed view on NewsBlur. We're working to make that more visible in some new designs we have coming soon.

One thing I loved about Google Reader's sharing ability was the powerful bookmarklet. You could select a part of the text in the page, call the bookmarklet, and have that part only shared in an article. I used and abused this feature to share things from feed I wasn't subscribed too. It's also very powerful for webpage that didn't have RSS. And you could edit before sharing (even the HTML!)! How awesome is that ?

All this was lost in the Google+ transition (which pushed me to NewsBlur). The one thing that wasn't lost was the "comment on top" which allowed your followers to see what you thought about the story before reading it. You could also comment after if you didn't want to spoil it (just like in G+/blurblogs). I had only a few followers, but this was the best feed reading experience of my life. (Ok, I also love NewsBlur frame tech that merges content and context).

Wouldn't it be nice if the comment were on top of the blurblog share ?

Comments on top are something I'm thinking about. Tell you what, in order to continue this discussion, would you mind moving it to a new thread on NewsBlur's community forums: http://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur. Just give it a good title and file it under Idea. That way everybody else can participate.

Also, that bookmarklet is a huge feature I'm working on for the next couple weeks. Thanks for the good ideas.

Google Reader is missing a serious mobile component, and I'm excited by what I see with NewsBlur. Congrats on the launch!

Late to the party but please submit the android app to the amazon appstore, the kindle fire might be a good platform for it.

Are you going to fix the feed archival problem at some point? (we've spoken about it before :-) )

You mean keeping stories indefinitely? Absolutely, it's just a technical limitation right now. At some point we'll move to a real archive.

yay, thats something that makes me nervous about newsblur, :) (even though i've signed up & paid etc, its a psychological barrier to daily use)

ooo, and the mathjax now renders correctly! :)

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