Ask HN: Are you building a Google Reader workalike? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you building a Google Reader workalike?

4 pointsToshio3 comments

Hello community!

When Google announced they would discontinue Reader, many of you stated your intentions to start developing an alternative.

How is your project going?

Post an update here.

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We aren't exactly building a "Google Reader workalike" but we do have a project[1] that is very much based on consuming and aggregating RSS feeds. It's a different model though, as the central abstraction is a "channel" (think "topic" or "subreddit") where a "channel" aggregates n RSS feeds, as well as any manually submitted content.

Think of what you would have if you could take a subreddit and point it to a bunch of RSS feeds and have it pull that content in automatically.

That said, we already have the ability to do freeform tagging, and it occurred to me last night that we could leverage the tagging support to build an interface for interacting with the feeds, that would act more like a traditional feed reader. I can't promise that we're going to add that, but it's on my mind.

Note that we aren't currently pursuing a SaaS application model... this is based on a "install and host it yourself" model - because our real focus in on enterprise use, and we expect people to consume feeds from things like their CRM system, document management system, internal blogs, etc. as a primary use case.

Also, as a side note, I think Dave Winer has some interesting thoughts here[2] for anybody considering building a new Reader.

[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

[2]: http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/march/theIdealRssReader

We just released our API to allow others to build tools even more powerful than Google Reader. We're not interested in building our own client, but we think our API could let others create beautiful news readers with deep social integration. https://streamified.me/developer/

I was building a system in early 2004 that crawled and cached RSS feeds to collate them into streams for users based on subscriptions. My intention was to have one set of crawlers bring things into a large cache that could be accessed by a use base vs. having everyone constantly hitting up every website for the latest RSS entries and reduce overall traffic (excessive RSS traffic was an issue at the time) and to also provide people with consistent website formatting (enhancing readability) and all of those other no-brainer things that we take for granted now.

I'd progressed quite well and had a handful of people who were helping me test it out thoroughly addicted to using it to consume the latest news from their favorite sites.

I spent entirely too much time building in social features and essentially recreating LiveJournal (Live Journal's ability to allow you to follow all of your friends blogs in a somewhat clean format was my inspiration but applied to any RSS source) and by the time I was ready to take it to the next level Google announced Reader and I abandoned the project (beaten to market by Google yet again)

I had other distractions that made it an easy decision but I guess I shouldn't have given in so easily. Live and learn!

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