Attensa Rolls Out of Beta
Michael Arrington
20 comments »
Attensa (previous profiles here) is announcing a bunch of product upgrades and releases tomorrow. The most important are the removal of the beta status from their Outlook and Online RSS readers. Both products are at 1.0 status as of tomorrow morning.
Both readers have fairly advanced features. Attensa Online 1.0, which is Ajax driven, has been criticized during its beta period for not having enough features. Many of those features are now included, and some, like tagging, are on the way. And both readers are fast, at least under current loads. One feature that I like on both products is the ability to review posts on a folder/feed basis, or “river of news” where posts are shown in a more traditional email format as they come in.
The big win with RSS readers, though, is in synchronization across applications. There are two aspects to this - synchronization of the feed (OPML) list, and synchronization of the status (read/unread/tagged/pinned) of individual posts. Both are important, although the difficult problem is synchronizing posts. Attensa is doing both.
NewsGator does attempt to synchronize posts from both its FeedDemon desktop product and its Outlook product to its online product, but you cannot directly syncronize between FeedDemon and Newsgator. Also, synchronization often breaks.
Attensa claims their architecture is robust enough to handle the difficult sync problem. Further testing will show if this is accurate. Note that the Attensa readers are all free; however the synchronization feature is $20 per year after a 30 day free trial.
Attensa also has a third reader, for mobile devices, coming within “four weeks”.
“And both readers are fast, at least under current load”
It’s amazingly easy to build a fast RSS reader with no load…
Wonder what their archive size is like? Rojo’s goes back a few years. Full archival history of feeds is another feature a lot of online aggregators still don’t do a very good job of..
Oh…. and not trying to advertise Rojo or anything
Actually the thing that was I was thinking of is that it’s a shame that there’s no archive.org for the blogosphere.
Kevin
Kevin,
We designed Attensa Online for large scale deployment. Please give the new release a try tomorrow. I would love to have your feedback.
Matthew Bookspan
Director of Product Management
Attensa, Inc.
Matthew…
Cool… I’ll play with it tomorrow… should be a good measure as I’m sure you’ll get some traffic from your 1.0.
Good luck…
The data size thing is another issue… I need to ping Brewster and the archive and shame them into archiving hte blogosphere
why do RSS readers (online / offline) qualify as web 2.0 content?
just curious…
At the moment (i.e. 10am GMT) the Attensa online reader (at online.attensa.com) ist closed for maintenance: “This service is currently closed while we upgrade hardware and deploy exciting new features.”
I guess that’s (partly) the TechCrunch effect.
I played with the demo and just loved it!
thanks Matthew,it seem like a great service!!
check out this screenshot:
http://img92.imageshack.us/img.....nsa1pm.jpg
“NewsGator does attempt to synchronize posts from both its FeedDemon desktop product and its Outlook product to its online product, but you cannot directly syncronize between FeedDemon and Newsgator. Also, synchronization often breaks.”
In the current release version, maybe. But FeedDemon 2, currently in beta available only to paid customers, syncs very tightly and accurately to Newsgator online.
I use the Attensa for Outlook 1.0 Beta and it still has some problems, so I hope they get fixed with tomorrow.
I have been an attensa beta tester for about 3 months now. As of the release candidate this product is FAR from ready for release. There are may crashes of outlook, problems with reading feeds, inability to do a complete uninstall, and many other problems.
The idea is very cool, and I really wanted them to get it right, but unfortunately of the 5 PCs I have installed this on, only 1 works reliably. The others require weekly reinstalls, hung outlook issues, attensa not updating, etc.
Also I noticed that one of the coolest features, ability to read del.icio.us bookmarks, also makes the product crash within a day of running.
So neat idea - FAR from ready! And of course MS is building RSS into the next outlook, so they are between a rock and a hard place to get this out quickly. Unfortunately quickly does not mean it’s ready yet!
Gene
Current (1.0 Beta) still breaks down far too often, mostly at Windows startup.
It also loses connection to their server often enough that I disabled synchronization.
A productivity tip for Outlook version:
don’t read the Attensa folders directly (in fact collapse it to one line only). Create an “Unread Mail” search folder on the Attensa.pst file, this will result in a hybrid of river of news / directories, only giving you the unread items.
Everyone,
Thank you for the feedback. We are aware of the uninstall issues with the beta. These as well as stability issues have been addressed in the 1.0 final release. I encourage you to please take another look and feel free to send me feedback (mbookspan@attensa.com).
Cordially,
Matthew Bookspan
Director of Product Management
Attensa, Inc.
I have been using the produc for about 3 months and have very little issues with it. On my work laptop, it has never behaved badly. On my desktop it does give me an error message at boot occasionally but still functions. I only wish I could read all the feeds I am getting. Damn ABC for multi-posting the same story.
I used the beta for a month (starting in the end of December) before I gave up completely. I also experienced LOTS of problems with stability, feeds not synchronizing, etc. Also, Attensa handles enclosures abysmally, when I uninstalled it was repeatedly downloading gigabytes of mp3’s from feeds I had deleted days ago. Oh, and whatever you do, don’t start ActiveSync before you’ve opened Outlook, or Attensa chokes HARD. (Which means remember to take your PDA out of its cradle before booting up) To the Attensa folks, sorry to rag on you here when I didn’t submit these problems to your forums, but I was just overwhelmed by all the problems. In contrast, Newsgator and FeedDemon beta 2 work GREAT, I haven’t had any problems at all. However, competition is always a good thing and I definitely think Attensa has the right idea, so best of luck to you! (Final note, these comments are in reference to the beta, all of these issues could have been resolved by now)
The Outlook beta choked post-install giving a bunch of registry errors. Not a bad app but I would have liked to have seen a search function within the blogs that I already subscribe to. And this might be from the registry errors I had… apart from there being a button that launches the app from within Outlook, how is it integrated again? I could not try the publishing function since it does not support MT.
Not sure if I would pay for this but with some improvements I might be tempted.
This is by far the worst program I have ever used. I have had problems with it from day 1. It slows Outlook down to a crawl not to mention it crashes quite frequently and just try to COMPLETELY un-install it!!!! Now they want money for it, I thing not!
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Not a patch on Google Reader. Sorry Ajax.