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January 29, 2006

NewsAlloy Reader = Fast

Michael Arrington

50 comments »

I’ve been testing NewsAlloy, a free, feature rich and very fast Ajax reader (zero page refreshes). All power-user features are included - tagging, pinning, river of news and folder-based viewing, easy digg and del.icio.us submission, and good search capabilities. I also like the keyboard shortcuts.

If the speed holds during user ramp up (a big if as the site has only been up since around December 1, 2005), this could become a cult favorite. However, this is not for RSS newbies.

Pete Cashmore wrote about them right after launch in December.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 2:54 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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  2. monkey_log

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  3. TechCrunch » The State of Online Feed Readers

    March 30th, 2006 at 9:29 pm

  4. Newcybertech Weblog » Blog Archive » Frankly Speaking About RSS Readers

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  5. SolSie’s Blog » The State of Online Feed Readers

    April 1st, 2006 at 9:02 am

  6. Section J » Blog Archive » Aggregate me.

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  7. Newsalloy הוא קורא RSS על סטרואידים · הפרדוקס

    October 21st, 2006 at 9:26 am

  8. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » 比較記事：オンラインのフィードリーダーを徹底比較！

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  9. Rockstar Bloggers Couldn’t Save NewsAlloy | 网络赚钱网摘

    May 2nd, 2008 at 10:31 am

  10. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » RSSリーダーNews AlloyがDeadpoolの仲間入りへ

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Comments

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  1. Nader

    January 29th, 2006 at 3:01 am

    Looks like a very powerful RSS-Reader compared to all the others out there.

    December 1, 2004? Isn’t it 2005?

  2. Michael Arrington

    January 29th, 2006 at 3:03 am

    Nader, thank for pointing out the typo. fixed.

  3. susan

    January 29th, 2006 at 3:20 am

    did you see pc mac http://www.pcmag.com/article2/.....856,00.asp

    the pioneer in the space for 411 is

    http://www.411sms.com

  4. Gabe

    January 29th, 2006 at 3:32 am

    There are so many online news readers now, they shouldn’t ask you for you to sign up. I’m serious, those 30 seconds are just too much. They should just save you user state in cookies and give you the opportunity to sign up if you like it.

  5. Michael Arrington

    January 29th, 2006 at 3:34 am

    Gabe, that’s a good point, and there is no reason to require a sign up to test basic functionality.

  6. Nader

    January 29th, 2006 at 3:52 am

    What about the common Lazy Registration approach?

    “Accumulate bits of information about the user as they interact, with formal registration occurring later on”

    http://ajaxpatterns.org/Lazy_Registration

  7. Lycos

    January 29th, 2006 at 4:53 am

    Has anyone tried http://www.gregarius.net

    It’s also an ajax news reader.
    It suits my needs quite well :)

    Should give it a try :)

  8. PeteCashmore

    January 29th, 2006 at 6:23 am

    I totally agree with Gabe - look at the way Netvibes creates a page for you without signup. This gets people hooked from the start.

    Oh, and thanks for the link, Mike - appreciated.

  9. Richard Curry

    January 29th, 2006 at 6:27 am

    This may be what I’ve been looking for since SearchFox closed down. Rojo just wasn’t for me. let the testing begin

  10. Jason Alexander

    January 29th, 2006 at 7:30 am

    You should also take a look at the new feed reader in Community Server (http://communityserver.org). It’s currently in beta 3, and the reader isn’t as feature full as newsalloy, but it’s pretty nice, and will only get better.

    Anyways, just wanted to pass it along.

  11. Bob Aman

    January 29th, 2006 at 8:45 am

    It’s cool, but I didn’t like having Google ads right in the middle of the action. It would have been ok if they were shoved down to the bottom of the page.

    Also, OPML import didn’t work too terribly well. I have 142 feeds in NNW, and NewsAlloy only imported 83 of them. And it took about 5 minutes to do it. Though… Google Reader took about twice as long to do it. So I don’t know, maybe there’s just something really tough about OPML parsing that I’m not aware of yet.

    In any case, I think I’m going to stick to my own self-written web aggregator and NNW.

  12. dave

    January 29th, 2006 at 8:47 am

    I guess we can kiss the fast speed goodbye.. thanks Mike

  13. theCreator

    January 29th, 2006 at 9:30 am

    Google reader is better. Though i use RSS Bandit

  14. theCreator

    January 29th, 2006 at 9:32 am

    OK…………… Is it just me or is it REALLLLLLLY slow.

  15. rick gregory

    January 29th, 2006 at 9:33 am

    Hmm… I think my OPML file import killed the server… even reloading FF all I get is ‘Loading…’

    I’ll bookmark this and check back, but if I can’t load my feeds it’s a non-starter…

  16. Jim Benson

    January 29th, 2006 at 10:12 am

    RE Bob’s OPML import…

    I did the same thing. Started with an OPML with 60, ended up with 12.

    Then I tried to import the feed from my blog. It showed the feed in the preview section - images and all. Looked beautiful. Then I hit “subscribe” and it insisted that the feed was empty.

    … but it had given me a preview of the feed!

    The reader looked very nice .. excellent formatting.

  17. M.A.K.

    January 29th, 2006 at 12:05 pm

    Nice…I feel as if I’m changing my RSS reader everyday! I may have to agree with the “fast” label as well, however.

  18. M.A.K.

    January 29th, 2006 at 12:09 pm

    Actually…this reader is so awesome, I could give a shit about how fast it is. Thanks for the heads up.

  19. Chris

    January 29th, 2006 at 12:24 pm

    5 minutes of “Loading” later, it is not enjoying importing my 300 feed Bloglines OPML file.

    Maybe I should try again with something a little more sanely sized.

  20. Alterion

    January 29th, 2006 at 12:39 pm

    hmm took the 104 from greatnews (great desktop rss reader.. highly reccomended to seacrhfox refugees).. and stripped it down to 86.. and now its on tc its slow as anything (your famous now mike you get your own mini-slashdot effect).. maybe i’ll come back in a few months to this product

  21. Michael Arrington

    January 29th, 2006 at 12:50 pm

    I apologize…the performance I had last night was superb. Today I can’t even get to the site. :-(

  22. Mike

    January 29th, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    300 feeds! Oh, so you are the one slowing it down =)

  23. Jim

    January 29th, 2006 at 2:28 pm

    I liked http://www.bensinclair.com/art.....ng-bennews, but I don’t know if it will be released or what.

  24. lordtime

    January 29th, 2006 at 11:34 pm

    Guys,

    sorry for slow down but what did you expected when 100 simultaneous users uploading their feeds at once ? :)

    have you ever expected a webserver able to do this quickly ? :)

    let the dust gets settled ! ;)

    thank you for good or bad words - this will make newsaloy just stronger and better when i’m making issues of this invasion :))

  25. Michael Arrington

    January 30th, 2006 at 1:55 am

    :-)

  26. John

    January 30th, 2006 at 5:02 am

    I have been trying Xprssit at http://xprssit.com/main. I really like it - it’s got everything I need but it’s still beta and has a few bugs. I have looked briefly at NewsAlloy and it’s definitely worth a trial period.

  27. Leandro Ardissone

    January 30th, 2006 at 5:52 am

    I use NewsAlloy since I know it (few months) and it’s amazing.
    Almost everyday new features.

    Now it’s slow because techcrunch effect.. :)

    That means NewsAlloy will grow up.

    Give they the chance.

  28. JD

    January 30th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    Gabe (#4), awesome point, man. I think NewsAlloy is really great. I’ve been looking for a new reader for a while. Bloglines is too limiting for my needs. Man, it’s fuckin’ slow though. Ha, I think I read a joke above about it being TechCrunched. I hope that issue can be addressed ’cause if it normally doesn’t have speed issues this may be my new reader.

  29. Josh Wilkins

    January 30th, 2006 at 9:15 am

    NewsAlloy = Dead Slow

    Until this gets some major updates it is not even worth the time to sign up. I imported a small file of 22 feeds and it was all over. Gave up trying to connect again after 7er so min.

  30. ultrainternet

    January 30th, 2006 at 9:23 am

    un saluto dall’Arcanave

  31. Ken Yarmosh

    January 30th, 2006 at 2:04 pm

    I agree with Gabe and Pete. In fact, when Pete wrote about it, I passed over even giving it a try because I was annoyed I had to sign-up.

  32. Louis Simoneau

    January 31st, 2006 at 11:00 am

    I had some pretty serious problems with it as well, the OPML import seemed to work okay, but I couldn’t reorganize the feeds (the move button didn’t work.) Also, possibly as a result of this post, the speed was far from lightning-fast.

    If there was a paucity of online news readers, I’d probably stick it out and wait for them to iron the bugs out, but as things stand there’s too much viable competition out there. When a site like this goes live, it’s got to be ready to rock your world, because if it doesn’t it’ll take you 10 seconds to find another service with the same features.

  33. Tof

    February 1st, 2006 at 10:31 am

    That’s a good work, but there are still too much clicks to view an article and mark it as read….
    I do prefer orijinn (orijinn.com), which has no ajax… but is fast as hell, and easy to use.
    For example, something which could be idiotic, but clicking “mark site as read” marks all feed articles as read, and show next feed… So, one click to do it all :)

    But of course, it’s not as much “poweruser” friendly !

  34. Mike Szubka

    February 3rd, 2006 at 1:14 pm

    Gabe, Michael, YodPod.com is an ajax-enabled RSS reader that doesn’t require registration. I developed it for me and some friends but all are welcome. Its still in very early development so please excuse the glitches.

  35. J. J.

    March 14th, 2006 at 7:13 am

    Alesti.org is another simple online RSS reader that doesn’t require registration. Great for testing out feeds!

  36. Hermann Klinke

    March 30th, 2006 at 6:51 am

    I tried every online feed reader out there and news alloy is the best so far. One of the worst is Google Reader in my opinion, it’s just too basic.

  37. Serop

    September 8th, 2006 at 12:50 pm

    Agreed, Google Reader and online NewsGator both suck big time, there are just nothing in there! Even for complete dummy beginner…

    The story with NewsAlloy is continuing - it’s seeking for investors and it will get ‘em, eventually! Have you seen Rojo acquisition recently? Rojo is simple enough (I mean features poor) comparing to NewsAlloy (although maybe Rojo is more stable). So, with clever features development and usability improvements for different types of online users, it can be rock solid web 2.0 app beating sectors leader… ;)

  38. Serop

    September 8th, 2006 at 12:52 pm

    oops, I mean sector leaders :)

  39. MyTech

    September 10th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    Yes. its good.

  40. yom

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:31 am

    straw is quite good too

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