Illinois-based Gritwire, a new Flash based RSS reader, launched today at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco.
These new Flash applications are always visually stunning, even if they are not as fast as their Ajax counterparts. GritWire is no exception – its well designed.
The RSS reader is functional but not spectacular. There are OPML import options and a feed search, but images are not shown in the reader and most (all?) formatting is also stripped out.
There are, however, a number of additional features, including a podcast player, alerts (I can’t seem to make this work) and a “wiki” feature. The wiki is a basic text box that can be edited by you and, I assume, your friends. It’s a nice collaboration tool (I want something like this wiki on my desktop for easy group working).
The Gritwire blog is here. Gritwire is hosting a big open bar launch party tonight at a San Francisco bar called The Cellar – in my opinion this was a bad idea. Expensive launch parties are very Web 1.0. Instead of throwing a party (and spending all your time asking everyone to attend), you should have just rented a room and demo’d the product for bloggers and other journalists all day. Very few people who show up for the free booze will give a damn about your product. I did, however, have a great conversation with Steven Cohen about Gritwire at the Pluck get together this evening. My guess is he’ll write more about Gritwire tomorrow sometime.
And I went home early (ignoring your party) so that I could test your product and write about it.
“Very Web 1.0.”
Are you kidding me?
Totally sucks! I’m impressed why you profiled this… It’s BUGGY, it’s lacking features, it not working!
I wonder how one can really use this to read rss feeds!
George – Give the product some time. After the founders work off their hangovers tomorrow I’m sure they’ll continue to improve the product.
And I do like the product, by the way.
I attended the party and it truly was in a cellar but I give the guys from my home state of Illinois a little credit for showing up and giving some folks at the conference a good time on the house. I got a demo of the product and hope to see more from them soon.
Michael, in my previous comment I mistakenly sounded like it was the bugs that “bugged†me about this reader. But no, the real problem for me is functionality. Stripping html is not a bug. It’s a feature (a BAD one in most cases). Lack of unicode support… Probably it’s a bug, but right now makes the reader unsuitable for a lot of people. It’s only a fancy User Interface. Good enough to make us (programmers, web and tech freaks) visit the site once, register to see the UI… then logout …forever… and go back to read our rss feeds in bloglines, google reader, etc.
If parties are out, what about Herman Miller Aerons? My back’s killing me!
If you’re trying to access the site from Linux, you’re out of luck. It requires Flash Player 8 which isn’t available on that platform. That’s too bad, since I really wanted to see their UI.
Actually, I’m with you Mike — I think Gritwire is not bad, although I wish it didn’t strip out the images. I think the interface could use some work, but all in all I thought it was pretty good — although I’m not sure Flash is the way to go for an RSS reader.
Although it has some nice ideas, I am wondering what the goals are with this thing. On my Mac it is slow and it cannot compete with the offline RSS readers at all. I wish them all the luck, but there need to be vast improvements ahead to win me over.
The images aren’t getting stripped from my reader…they just take a few seconds to load on occasion.
“(I want something like this wiki on my desktop for easy group working)”
Try MoonEdit (old but effective) – we use it at work.
why use flash for something like this? it’s completely ridiculous… surely. it must have been so hard to code compared to if they had just used basic HTML (and perhaps even AJAX to achieve the same functionality). Baffled! I really don’t see the point in flash for functional applications these days. for nice animation perhaps but I don’t see how it can be taken seriously for stuff like this.
and regarding gritwire. surely netvibes is sooooooooo much better. what is gritwire going to do that would make me use it rather than netvibes? btw the point about most of the users just having visited once, signed up (which is mandatory) and then left is very critical. all of the users i searched for (without exception) didn’t have a single favourite feed. this is quite a good indication of what people think of this site. sorry
does anyone know if they got funding for this project?
I don’t know what it is, but I am not that impressed. It seems clunky and not too innovative. This is coming from someone that is pretty in-tune with computing/internet/etc… but not blinded by the web2.0 phenomenon (where everything 2.0 is cool). I truly like the a lot of the stuff out there, but this isn’t THAT great (coming from a plain users perspective). The UI is a bit boring, and feed searching bring up a lot of garbage. Nice effort though… I am sure it will get better over time.
+
requires flash 8 – that leaves out users of Linux until macromedia provides flash 8 for Linux