Popular single page aggregator OriginalSignal has relaunched and is now much more than just an inflexible startpage for lazy people – it’s added a list of features that make it more useful than ever.
The site displays the newest headlines from a selection of the most popular blogs on a variety of topics. The first few lines of each post are displayed when you hover over a headline. New items since the last time you viewed the page are highlighted in read. That makes it very easy to pop over to OriginalSignal throughout the day and see if the selected blogs have been updated without even reading the headlines.
To be clear, I’ve been one of those lazy people using OriginalSignal for months now, instead of taking the time to compile my own startpage to supplement my feed reader. With today’s relaunch though, OriginalSignal brings more to the table than ever.
The first page was on Web 2.0, then several others were added over the past few months and today the site has added pages on Science, Games, 15 Blogs, Apple, World news, Politics, Sports, Finance, Marketing, Movies and Video. There’s a “most popular” section for each page, divided by the day, week and month.
In addition to new topical pages, the site now includes search provided by Yahoo!, the ability to resize fonts in the display, change the order of the feeds shown, grab a widget to display a page’s feeds on your blog and perhaps most importantly, view a river of news version of each page on a mobile phone. There are several other feature updates in addition to these and the site looks quite different now as well.
The video page displays screen captures from the most recently added videos on YouTube, MySpace Video, Yahoo Video, Google Video, iFilm, Metacafe, Break.com, Dailymotion and Grouper. If porn offends you, you’re liable to see something you don’t like on the video page at any given time.
Start pages like Netvibes, Pageflakes or Webwag still provide more flexibility and full fledged RSS readers are essential – but OriginalSignal is a handy, quick aggregation tool that offers some content and some functionality for almost everyone. It’s an easy way to familiarize yourself with a handful of popular blogs. I expect the new version of the site will be an even bigger hit than the first.
If single page aggregation is something you’re interested in, make sure to check out Popurls and Brian Benzinger’s post reviewing the many services doing something similar.
imho originalsignal was always a popurls clone, they just try to be everything to everyone.
Marshall – Looks like we both posted at the same time – great minds think alike?
http://www.cent...es-major-update
You spelled Popurls incorrectly in the last paragraph…
Good writeup!
That’s a really well designed front page that Original Signal have come out with. Really liked the simplicity and coverage.
Am too new to blogging to compare the options but I was really looking for this kind of a ‘aggregator’ and finding it here has been a great relief.
Aggregation as a ’service’ is never too far behind anyways – be it blogs or any other product/service
Yea, it’s helpful it you are trying to drive traffic to techcrunch. I dont understand what makes it worth visiting when they can’t even figure out how to get around posting pages and the annoying flash eula problem. Stay with pageflakes.
Bloglines has something like this too: playlists. It transforms your feeds into a startpage like originalsignal. I’ve been using http://www.nowsy.com for some time now. It’s basically an ajax startpage like netvibes, but adds the functionality to search through the startpages I have created, something none of the other startpages offer. An example: http://www.nows...age.php?o=web20
Come on, originalsignal is boring copycat stuff. I’ll stick to popurls.
nice redesign, but still so techy/bloggy focus’d, some of us stooges still like to see what the big news outlets are saying, and for that I will still with
http://www.majo...networknews.com
as my “pre-aggregator”, or as you all put it, the lazy persons netvibes/pageflicks.
Adam, majornetworknews.com is a pretty cool site and totally related.
sorry, meant to post the slice I like (world news)
http://www.majo...how/group/world
http://mefeedia.com/lists/ does something like that for media (videoblogs and podcasts). The lists are handpicked by users, and each list of feeds also generates a page with a mix of all the entries, like this one which aggregates SecondLife videobloggers and podcasters on one page here:
http://mefeedia...ists/7/entries/
I Like what I see, but I am still to new to comment about competing sites.
I’ve just had a look at the “games” page of Original Signal, I’ve got to say I think there’s far better games aggregators out there at the moment.
http://www.gameboar.com certainly makes the Original Signal page look very amateur in comparison.
This is very good…and as the post says…works well for people who have less time
@Brad
I don’t understand why people keep mentioning ‘they stick to’ popurls. Sure, both sites scrape RSS feeds and present it in a similar way, and maybe Popurls was the first but who cares? How can you compare them when it is clear that OS wants to become a lot more than just web 2.0 buzz? I tell you, there is really no science or marketing channel to be found at popurls!
Wil, that’s rather silly of you. What you don’t understand is that Thomas Marban’s Popurls commands so much loyalty that all kinds of people (that you’ve never heard from before) continuously come out of the woodwork to leave comments in support of it.
Why, consider Sam’s and Brad’s comment above. Sam also had a good one here, where he wisely recommends Yahoo buy Popurls: http://www.tech...#comment-405129 Apart from matters pertaining to Popurls, Sam doesn’t have a whole lot to say on TechCrunch. That’s how awesome Popurls is.
Techmeme is also lucky to have several people clamoring for Techmeme’s inclusion in Popurls, such as commenter Scott Stawarz
http://scobleiz...#comment-174351
along with “Robert”:
http://www.tech.../#comment-37653
I bet if I only struck some kind of deal with Popurls, I could finally get Techmeme to appear on Popurls, finally placating Scott and Robert.
This is newsworthy? I don’t dispute that this is a useful service for some people, but it’s extremely basic and for the blog “dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies” to review something that I can’t classify as a real “product” or “company”, not once, but twice, is a bit crazy. Is the next post going to be about AboutUs signing up for an AdSense account or Zooomr adding 5 new servers?
I use OriginalSignal just watch what’s being written in the Web 2.0 area.
Techcrunch,
These are your current download times:
14.4K 396.71 seconds
28.8K 198.46 seconds
33.6K 170.13 seconds
56K 102.16 seconds
ISDN 128K 31.43 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 2.91 seconds
Think you need to optimize some shit on your site.
F.
between this and POPURLs and it may become impossible to leave the PC
Talk about the information age …. geez
And if that isn’t enough: TechCrunch and MOMB Museum of Modern Betas will do it
I honestly don’t see what is so “innovative” about OriginalSignal, its basically content being pull in from RSS of these sites. Why would TechCrunch showcase such basic and not so smart technology…
Appear to me that lately, TechCrunch is promoting their friends’ product rather than what is out there.
Ted, your a fuckwit.
It is so “basic and not so smart” then why the fuck didnt you produce.
how about you shut the fuck up and stop reading techcrunch if you dont like.
fucking wanka
I’m lazy, therefore I put it as my homepage now. =p
Notso
Hey now. Be cool with the language guy. I have been a reader and a supporter of TC way back. Recently, some of the profiling of some of these products just doesn’t seem to be too innovative. I felt that the audience is craving for something “innovative” and smartly craft up using new technology. Don’t get me wrong, OriginalSigna is no doubt useful, but wasn’t something new. Not to affend you or anything. If you read some of the previous comments from #14 Will and #16 Drama 2.0 – we all felt the same way.
Michael Arrington, you might want to consider removing comment #21 Notso. Getting out of control here. This is a professional environment.
I too am unimpressed by OriginalSignal. It’s like an Ajax Desktop without the Desktop. Pretty graphics, though.
support Ted
Is it just me that would prefer a hybrid aggregator that sorts and filters the content so that you don’t have to poor over dupes over one that just lists what’s on the RSS feeds?
I build a copycat “feed of feeds” site, using only Wordpress and a freely available plugin. http://www.noisebox.com.
Happy to add any content category, or site, people would find useful.
Originalsignal seems to get coverage here at exactly the same time as Web 2.0 list.
Kinda shady.
Most of these are focused on news or tech. There is a very basic sports related one at http://www.sporturls.com.
I like using OS. I would not say i’m lazy – I just like efficiency
for the super lazy people that dont like to read check out http://www.slists.com .
Me like pretty pictures
http://www.berble.com sits in this space too, it’s also quite techy focussed, but does cover business & sports too …
Sure technically it’s nothing new, but the categories and good design makes OS pretty good imo.
Sounds like a pretty nice service. I am looking forward to a good startpage solution.
How do they make money? How will they?
There’s a similar service for techies that’s been around since March or so: 2TonGorilla (http://www.2tongorilla.com). It’s the only site I need to satisfy my daily tech news, tips, info, software and gadgets monkey.
A similar style site that focuses on deals/shopping: http://www.dealcrew.com
Grande sito!!
luogo fine, sapete..
Desidero appena dire che e un luogo ben cotto
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD, %-DDD,