The Next Web

Ukrainian based NewsAlloy.com wants to compete with all the major feed readers

Written on March 7, 2008 – 12:01 am
Martin Kloos, Business consultant

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As we all know feeds are driving the social web revolution. And services that make your feed reading life easier are plenty. I for instance used to be a big fan of Rojo, but since Google Reader came along I’m all in the j - k - s - alt-s thing. And with competitors like Bloglines, Feedlounge and Newsgator, competition is rough.

The more I appreciate the efforts of Ukrainian based NewsAlloy.com, who wants to offer “zero refresh features” and Gmail style navigation. Techcrunch covered NewsAlloy in January 2006 so they are around for quite some time, but it seems they just recently relaunched with version 2 of their reader.

The latest version has a pretty slick interface with a useful navigation bar on the right of your feeds. It offers default features like sharing, pinning, tags, key shortcuts, OPML import and mobile support. The interface feels a lot like Google reader and is indeed lighting fast. But due to some tiny usability issues (for instance, the title of a post is pretty small and the interface is pretty overwhelming at first) I have a bit of a hard time getting used to it. Fortunately, the interface is pretty much customizable so much of the features can be altered or concealed totally.

It seems that NewsAlloy focuses on the feed reading experts with a complete and future rich ajax interface. Small trivia: It appears that NewsAlloy was for sale in late 2007, but couldn’t make a deal so they focused on developing version 2 of their service. But perhaps you can make them an offer they can’t refuse…

feed reader, newsalloy, rss, ukraine

About the author: Martin works at a large consulting organization in the Netherlands as Web strategy consultant and evangelist. He studied information studies at the University of Amsterdam, conducting research on the effects of social software on knowledge management. Being passionate about almost everything evolved in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

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