TechCrunch
Digg Reader Is A Promising, But Still Incomplete, Google Reader Alternative (Hands On)
For a subset of the Internet’s population, Google’s March announcement of its intention to shutter its dated, rusting RSS feed-reading service Google Reader was met with a large outcry. Though never having grown to a size that made the service worth sustaining in Google’s eyes, its niche user base was devoted and heavily engaged. They were the Internet’s most active readers, the power users capable of handling more advanced tools for digging up all the interesting things you can find on the web.
And now, they were homeless.
Immediately following Google’s announcement, the team at Digg.com grieved, too, saying:
“Like many of you, we were dismayed to learn that Google will be shutting down its much-loved, if under-appreciated, Google Reader on July 1st. Through its many incarnations, Google Reader has remained a solid and reliable tool for those who want to ensure they are getting the best from their favorite sections of the Internet.
But even better, they decided to do something about it.
Digg announced it would build a Google Reader replacement, one that would not only replicate what Google Reader once offered, including its API platform, but that would also better reflect the way we find content in 2013, where networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and others also serve as sources for discovery.
Why Digg Digs RSS
Digg, which was acquired by betaworks last year, is no longer the Internet powerhouse of years past, where landing on the site’s front page regularly crashed everything from small blogs to larger publishers’ websites, as its massive influx of traffic quickly overwhelmed the sites’ servers. Under betaworks, the team has been rebuilding Digg from the ground-up, keeping the brand, domain name, the ubiquitous “thumbs up” symbol, and not much more.
In the months since, the new Digg.com has begun to see some success. BuzzFeed, a news site dependent on making its largely list-based content go viral in order to support a smaller handful of more serious news stories (including, incidentally, a must-read on Google Reader’s demise), reported this April that referral traffic from Digg to online publishers has grown by 93 percent over the past 12 months.
To feed Digg.com’s ever-present need for the best of the web, a Digg-branded RSS reader fits right in.
The reader product, says Digg GM Jake Levine, is for the “hyper power users who want to do a lot of work to customize their reading experience.” He says the Digg team is a part of that group, too. (Levine subscribes to over 100 RSS feeds himself, he tells us.)
These are the kinds of people who continually scour a massive amount of web content on a regular basis, and seed networks — like Digg, Reddit or Twitter — with content. They’re often the first to spot interesting stories poised to go viral, and they’re also often the first to share them.
For those behind the new Digg.com and now Digg Reader, content discovery is an area which they’ve been inspired to work on for years. News.me, an earlier betaworks project built in conjunction with The New York Times R&D lab, was trying to solve a similar problem as Digg, explains Levine, who had started News.me with Digg CTO Michael Young.
“There’s a problem with reading on the Internet,” he says. “As more and more people shift their reading time over to digital, there is such an enormous supply of amazing content, and so few tools that help you get through that, and identify what’s most important to you, and the networks and people that you care about.”
Digg.com today is helping to solve that problem, by surfacing the content a large number of people agree is the best, but it doesn’t offer any sort of personalization features, nor does it understand your own interests.
Digg Reader, however, does.
THE NEW DIGG READER
Sign Up, Import Your Feeds
When users first visit the new Digg Reader, they’re able to sign up using Twitter, Facebook or Google. Since many of these new arrivals will be Google Reader refugees, the option to import your Google Reader subscription list is available, and if you have a lot of feeds, Digg offers to email you when the import is complete.
After signing in, you’ll notice that your folders may not be in the same order they were in Google Reader, but that’s a function of how Google’s Takeout service exports them to its archive and not an error on Digg Reader’s part. At this point, you’ll probably need to do a little work to get the folders back the way you had them, so it’s best if you complete the reader setup before Google Reader shuts down.
At first glance, Digg Reader looks a lot like any other Google Reader alternative. Folders and feeds on the left, unread item counts, a “favorites” section (here, called “Saved”) and then scannable headlines and timestamps on the right.
You can navigate with Google Reader keyboard shortcuts (j/k to move through feeds, Shift + j/Shift + k to move through folders), click a bookmark button to save items or an arrow to share with Twitter and Facebook, or click the “Add” (+) button at the bottom to subscribe to a new feed. From the Settings, you can also configure a button for your preferred “read later” service – Pocket, Readability, or now betaworks-operated Instapaper.
You can mark all items as read and switch a list and expanded view, the former, however, not being quite as tight as Google’s “compact” view. You can edit folder titles, drag and drop feeds to organize them, and unsubscribe to get rid of those you no longer want to track.
A “Browse” section available from the “Add” button enables content discovery, too, letting users find new feeds by categories like Politics, Books, Science, Internet, Music, Sports, Design and more.
The Popular Section
Those are the basics of any RSS reader, of course.
What Digg Reader will offer to set itself apart is what’s planned for the backend, only some of which is functioning at the time of launch. The company is refining the algorithms that will connect the Reader to your network of social connections in order to discover and rank those items that are most popular with your friends. These will appear in the “Popular” section, explains Levine, which is based largely on sharing data.
Individual items are ranked here and throughout your “All” feed with one, two or three dots (which remind us in terms of looks of betaworks’ iOS game Dots, as it happens).
The idea to rate and rank RSS feeds by popularity is not a new one. Google Reader has always offered a “Sort by Magic” option, for example. And back in Google Reader’s heyday – if you’ll imagine that it ever had one – a service from Postrank offered a Google Reader add-on that added color to that option, showing the hottest (most discussed) items in your feed collection.
In Digg Reader, that concept returns with these dots, which Levine says offers a hint of a larger vision for the Reader product, which is to first “do all the utility things” one expects from an RSS reader, then experiment with new ways “to let the networks of people you care about inform the priority with which you identify and consume content.”
The sharing data that Digg Reader uses is not entirely based on volume, but is more personalized to you. In time, the plan is to introduce other signals as well, like anonymized data on views and feed click-throughs, for example.
Digg.com Integration
Most importantly, perhaps, is that Digg Reader is not a standalone product like many of the alternative RSS readers are today. It’s a piece of the greater whole that is Digg.com. In Reader, users can tap “d” on their keyboard to “digg” the feed they’re reading — something that will help signal trending content.
Another section in Digg Reader keeps track of the items you digg — a feed that you can choose to make public or private.
What’s Missing
It’s impressive that Digg was able to produce a functional Google Reader alternative in such a short amount of time, but the service, as it stands today, is not a replacement for Google’s product. In order to get feed reader to the point of launch, other features had to be sacrificed.
Search, for starters, is not available yet. But Levine says the team knows of its importance and plans on adding it in time.
The company is also working to integrate other services like Evernote, Buffer and IFTTT, for example, and it plans to address the infrastructure challenge of tagging, too. (In our tests, only some of our saved tags in Google Reader made it into Digg, but even then some tag folders were empty. If you rely on an archived collection of tagged items, you’ll want to sync your data into another feed readers like Feedly before Google Reader shuts down.)
Notifications are another area which Digg Reader plans to focus in the weeks ahead. “I think Google Alerts is being systematically ignored as a product within Google and has gotten meaningfully worse in the last couple of years,” says Levine.
On Mobile
At launch, Digg Reader is being introduced into the company’s iOS (iPhone and iPad) apps, which will also sync with Digg Reader on the web, as well as offer a way to just view podcast RSS feeds and play them automatically. Another experimental feature will allow users to just view videos.
However, the Digg Android app is still a month or two away from completion.
To be clear, Digg Reader will not be offered as a separate app, but will be bundled into the company’s main Digg.com mobile application on both platforms.
Beyond Digg Reader: The Digg “Suite” Of Products
Though today’s focus is on Digg Reader, what it does and what it still lacks, the company has a bigger vision for Digg.com. For starters, it will eventually charge for some of the service’s more advanced features as a way to generate revenue. The basics, including both what’s launching today, as well as many features in the weeks ahead, will continue to be free, Digg has already said.
Digg doesn’t even know what those premium features may be yet, but Levine says Search is under consideration. The idea will be to target the power users among the power users for these paid additions, though, which means it’s a relatively small audience.
More broadly, Digg sees Reader and Digg.com’s collection of popular links as two ends of a spectrum that could ultimately include a wide range of products.
“Using a combination of editors, algorithms and networks, there should be products that use the tools at our disposal to narrow — in the positive sense of the word — the articles that you read and talk about,” says Levine. “Depending on how you find and consume information on the Internet, [Digg's suite of products] are going to build experiences in different ways to accommodate all those use cases.”
Sign Up Details
Digg Reader sign-up is here, but it’s a staged rollout. Digg CEO Andrew McLaughlin says users who had already signed up on the waitlist are being added in batches starting today, as Digg scales up. Rollout to will complete by tomorrow, June 26. The company will make a more formal announcement on its blog later today, and will also post a link to allow users to add themselves to the end of the queue at that time.
Digg Reader Is Now Open
Exactly one week before Google Reader shuts down entirely, Digg has opened up access to the Digg Reader beta. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we sat down with General Manager Jake Levine and President Andrew McLaughlin to discuss the details of the product, as well as the long-term roadmap.
Digg now has two main products, which reach entirely different content consumers. Digg is a passive-consumption experience — you head over to Digg.com and check out 50-80 of the biggest stories of the day with no work required on your part. With Digg Reader, the company is going after power consumers who don’t mind putting in a little effort to build their feeds.
But Digg and Digg Reader are only pieces of a larger puzzle, McLaughlin explained to me. Eventually, the data sourced from Digg Reader will allow for a consumption experience with all the personalization and customization of a reader, but without all the work.
But before the middle ground can be found, the team is focused on perfecting the Digg Reader experience, and that involves speed. According to Levine, speed and reliability — “the invisible things that you don’t see” — were the biggest challenges in developing the product.
After all, Google had a massive, powerful infrastructure to power their Reader, and Digg wants users who are transitioning to have a similarly snappy experience.
But they don’t want to just be as good as Google. They want to be better. For now, that means tweaking and iterating the Popular Sort, which scores the last thousand or so items across a number of factors to determine what is the most popular content at that given time.
Eventually, that will extend into what’s popular within your social circles, or over a given period of time, or in a particular location.
However, Digg Reader is missing one thing that Google Reader has: Search. According to McLaughlin and Levine, it’s still undecided whether or not Search (which will be added to the service eventually) will be part of the premium product or the free version.
“Search isn’t something that the majority of people use, but those who use it find it to be very important,” said Levine. “We haven’t decided if we’ll make it part of the premium product, but it’s entirely possible since it’s one of the more expensive features we’ll be adding. We’re toying with the idea of having pricing line up with costs.”
Luckily, Digg Reader has the power of betaworks behind it, which includes a number of resources from other content-focused companies like bit.ly, Instapaper, and Tapestry. However, when integrating with other services, Digg Reader plans to stay neutral.
“We want to be neutral,” said McLaughlin. “We’ll treat Pocket and Readability and Flipboard all the same as we do Instapaper. We won’t play favorites with our API.”
With the death of Google Reader, Digg isn’t the only player stepping up to bat. According to the team, the biggest competitors to watch are Feedly, Reeder, and Flipboard. “Even though it’s different, it’s still trying to serve active consumption,” said McLaughlin.
One note taken out of the Flipboard playbook is the ability to sign in to your subscriptions (like with the NYT and WSJ) and see that content in full within the stream. That’s something the Digg Reader team is highly interested in, as well as keeping ad-based publishers happy. But in the end, they believe that the premium product will pay for itself.
Digg Reader beta is open now, but will roll out slowly to ensure a great experience for users. The team is also launching an iOS app alongside today’s desktop launch, and an Android app will be available in the next three to four weeks. You can sign up now here.
New Joyent Service Offers Analytics Without Having To Move Data
Data is really hard to move. It becomes pretty much intractable as it increases in mass. Sure it can be pulled out, but that takes time and bandwidth and incurs a host of costs typically associated with using a cloud service. To really get the most of all that stored data, it’s increasingly apparent that moving it is not really a good idea.
Joyent’s new Manta Storage Service puts the compute together with the data in the cloud where it can be processed in one place. The compute is available directly on the object store, meaning that the data can be queried immediately without having to manage all the underlying infrastructure.
The new storage allows customers to analyze log data, financials and other data-intensive functions without moving data into separate clusters, which can take hours depending on the amount of data needed to be processed. Services like Amazon Web Services, by contrast, separate compute from storage, which can mean a lot of time and cost spent just moving data around.
The ramifications of the Manta service are considerable and make Joyent more relevant as an infrastructure and a services provider. In an interview last week, CTO and Co-Founder Jason Hoffman said Joyent will make a number of announcements in the coming months about new data services.
The Joyent news is another example of the disruption to the network attached storage market. Joyent Manta Storage means a customer can spin up instances without waiting. This means that the company can charge by the second as opposed to by the minute or hour. It also means data gets processed in one place without the need to spin up any number of servers to keep a service running.
That’s the big trick here, and it took Joyent four years to research, develop and make it happen. Now we’ll have to see how much traction Joyent can get in a market that includes AWS, Microsoft, IBM and a host of other competitors.
A Professional Viner's Take On Instagram Video
I’ve already said my piece when it comes to the Vine vs. Instagram video debate, but what do other users have to say about it?
Instagram and Vine user Meagan Cignoli posted the same stop-animation video on Vine and Instagram, and asked her followers which was better. She’s a power user on both platforms, with nearly 10,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 200,000 followers on Vine.
And the overwhelming consensus? Vine FTW!
Only one person, of the hundreds who responded, chose Instagram.
Here is the Vine:
Here is a link to the Instagram version.
As you can see, the Instagram video looks slightly grainy and has a zoomed in aspect ratio compared to the Vine. Cignoli explained that, for the type of stop-animation that she does, she must use the Cinema feature to shoot in Instagram video. When shooting in Instagram, the app’s stabilization software is automatically running, which means that your preview is slightly zoomed in.
You can turn this feature off after you’ve shot the video, which should yield a higher quality video, but that means that it’s impossible to frame a stop animation without showing what’s outside the frame, or “the reality of the set,” as Cignoli put it.
Other than the Cinema difference, the videos are exactly alike. Cignoli said that she used the same iPhone 5 for both videos, in the same exact tripod, and even pushed the record button the exact same number of times. And when all was said and done, the vast majority of responses seemed in favor of Vine.
Of course, this isn’t… like, science or anything. Meagan’s mini poll doesn’t solve the riddle for good.
She’s a professional photographer who now makes a full-time living on Vine, shooting “Vads” for brands like Loews.
She says that she started posting her photography on Facebook and Twitter in order to gain new clients, but held out on joining Instagram for a long time. “I didn’t want to take pictures with my phone,” she said. “I’m a photographer!”
But eventually she caved. “I joined late for Instagram, so it was hard for me to get on the Popular page and really get any traction,” Cignoli said. “I joined Vine early enough to get on the Popular page early on and pick up followers.”
Ever since, she focuses on Vine full time, working with around 12 to 15 brands.
That said, Meagan’s following on Instagram is more like a cult than her army of Viners, so we can’t necessarily trust their accuracy (even if all but one chose Vine). You can determine for yourself which of these stop-animation videos are better.
For Meagan, it’s Vine all the way. That’s not to say that she doesn’t enjoy Instagram video. “I like that Instagram video looks like Instagram pictures,” she said. “That’s why I used a filter, because that’s the draw in Instagram. It’s why you use it. And I wanted to show both services at their very best.”
Warning: Viewing of Meagan’s Vine stream will likely steal hours from your day. Be prepared to get engrossed.
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