While RSS may be slowly dying, startups are still building interesting products around the stale technology. Launched at TechCrunch 50’s DemoPit, Fresh Sliced News is a free Adobe Air powered-desktop application that lets you to build a personalized newspaper from your favorite news sources on the web.
Once you’ve downloaded the app, you can create personalized sections on the app such as “Technology,” “Food,” “Fashion.” Within each section Fresh Sliced News lets you pull in the RSS feeds of 140 news sites and blogs. You can also add other RSS feeds manually if you have the feed’s URL. Content is automatically added to the app and items are given more visual prominence corresponding to their importance, which is determined two criteria— the level of engagement a news story is receiving on the internet (gauged by PostRank’s technology) and the interests a user has demonstrated in the subject matter of the news on the application. So if I tend to read more news about wine in my “food” section, the articles about wine will be more prominent within the app.
When you hover over an article, a pop-up window appears with a snapshot of the content. When you click on a post, you are taken, via a separate window, to the article’s site, where you can read the post and browse the site. I especially like how you don’t have to leave the app to read the content on a news site.
The app itself is visually appealing and easy to read. It doesn’t appear cluttered, which can be a problem for sites and apps that are aggregating news stories and large amounts of content. Of course, Fresh Sliced News faces its biggest competition from Google Reader and the plethora of other RSS feed aggregators on the web so it might be tough for the startup to gain serious traction. But if you can get past the strange quirks and bugs of Adobe Air, Fresh Sliced News is worth a look.
This looks a bit like a Times (OS X) rip-off to me…
Aguante el Palacio Salvo
Reminds me of Myk Melez’s Snowl: http://www.tech...irefox-browser/
an excellent portal I am downloading as we speak. This is perfection!
I always have trouble keeping up to date with news. So I guess for that purpose this app will work perfectly.
Hi there Facebook User, we didn’t know Times when we designed Fresh Sliced News, but we think that if you try the two products you’ll find they’re very different. Fresh Sliced News uses no templates to size and place articles, generating each layout dynamically based on the individual ranking of each story. While we haven’t actually used Times and don’t know if it has an embedded browser, it was essential to us to have one so that readers still engage with the actual webpages, giving publishers the pageviews they’ve earned. Finally, we think you’ll find that our look and feel is quite unique — it’s the result of a lot of brainstorming and experimentation, and we hope that shows.
Elon for the Fresh Sliced News team
Great concept. I think this has some merit.
I think I have a pretty fast computer, but the application moves very slowly. So slow, for me it’s probably unusable right now which is unfortunate.
Is this Adobe Air or the application?
Layout is excellent.
(Also in the future, wouldn’t this rock if it had a mail preview / facebook stream and twitter stream?)
Agreed, the slow transitions are a bit frustrating and ruin the reading experience.
Also, how do you add a site that doesn’t automatically come up in the search? I can’t seem to figure that out.
This is a pretty cool application. I downloaded and made a few tabs. I really like the UI and the enlarged view on hover. Looks like you can start typing a news source and just select the source if it comes up in the auto suggest. I’d like to add other sites but looks like I can’t for now. Would be cool if this was paired with the feed base of http://www.alltop.com.
Thanks alot….very nice info