Blendle Is Up to Something Big | Hacker News Reader

Blendle Is Up to Something Big

mondaynote.com

62 pointsJeanMertz15 comments

Another fun thing about Blendle is that it is open source. At least, only the front-end, and probably unintentionally.

They left their Webpack source maps on the server [1]. Chrome automatically unpacks the source map into a directory structure in the 'sources' debug view. It's nice to see how they are building their React application.

I've previously sent them an email about this, but never got a reply back. I've just sent them an email again. Let's see what happens.

[1] https://www.blendle.com/js/app.js.map

Love how a nay-sayer (www.mondaynote.com/2014/11/02/the-new-york-times-and-springer-are-wrong-about-blendle/) got converted to a believer. Kudos to Blendle for changing the proposition and to the author for taking another look.

Blendle offers articles across various outlets. It's a dataminer's dream: they can monitor the interests of the readers of the articles like no online newspaper/article site can as they can track what readers read across various sites, how long the reader is paying attention, how it is shared, with whom, in what order they're reading the articles etc. etc.

This is also the downside of this system: Blendle can create a very detailed profile of your interests and thus you. This is very sad, as Blendle isn't free, so you pay for the articles you read not only with money but also with your privacy, and with no influence on what will happen with the profile data Blendle created.

I know the group of people who is concerned about their privacy is small (or not big enough, I'd say), and this might look like paranoid whining, but in case you didn't realize this: now you do :)

Blendle Data Scientist here (living said dream). I'd like to mention that users do have influence on what is done with their data. We currently provide two ways of determining what data is collected, one setting (which is switched on by default) makes us collect data for internal usage. Switching this off will make us stop sending analytics events from the frontend and we will stop aggregating your data into a profile used for personalization. Note that these profiles are currently being developed and are not yet in use anywhere and once they will there only use case will be making Blendle better for its users. The other setting is switched off by default and allows us to share some data with one specific publisher (which is very clearly mentioned).

I have been using Blendle nearly since the day they launched for reading Dutch newspapers. It is absolutely great: I can cherry-pick articles without subscribing to a newspaper, I don't have to shop around on different newspaper sites and they have this great feature where you can request a refund if an article is not what you expected quality-wise.

Also, they have this nice feature where you can register your newspaper subscription to get unlimited access in the Blendle webapp.

The only thing that I find lacking is an Android app - the webpage is sometimes slow on my nicely spec'ed ASUS tablet and I'd like to save longer articles for offline use.

They do have an Android app, but I must admit I haven't used it on an Android tablet, so maybe it is only for phones?

Thanks for pointing this out, I completely missed that they introduced an app. Maybe it was not available in Germany before? (Dutch expat here ;))

Edit: There also seem to be two apps:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.blendle.app...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blendle.ap...

I cannot install the first (possibly because I am not in NL).

That first app is odd. I am in the Netherlands, but it is "not available in your country". The second one is.

Hi, one of Blendle's Android devs here (Dutchie as well). The first one used to be the official app, but since it posed some problems we deprecated it. It'll be removed from the store soon. The second one is atm only meant for Germany, but that might change very soon... :-)

The one thing that is still bugging me is their automatic refill of your wallet. As soon as I noticed it refilled far more often than I liked, I quickly turned off the automatic refill. And now I am very conscious again of the costs of reading an article. I am constantly thinking: "Is this article really worth € 1,-?". Most of the time, no. Either I do not buy the article at all or I ask my money back after reading it. The thing is: their is really not that much content that is worth (like in paying for) reading. My favourite spot for reading opinions is currently Medium. The quality of the articles and the joy of reading is much better.

Alexander Klöpping visited silicon valley for a series on dutch tv, I guess he got inspired there :) http://dewerelddraaitdoor.vara.nl/media/230201 (Dutch)

The thing with the Dutch adoption rate is indeed the use of public television for massive pitching of the product. He had an 'Oprah book club' opening and executed succesfully.

It's increasingly clear that the future of publishing—for content providers—will be to relinquish control and publish their content directly to third-party distribution and engagement platforms.

See also: Snapchat Discover & Facebook Instant Articles.

I can't possibly believe publishers could be stupid enough to partner with Blendle. Blendle clearly, as demonstrated by the effort to duplicate content down to the pixel, intend to be a middleman and, if they get popular, control the pubs. If they were a SSO solution that allowed you to pay and see an article on the original pubs it might be a good deal.

After seeing what happened with apple and itunes/music, or amazon and kindle/ebooks, I just can't see how content makers are willing to make the same error. Letting a third party own your relationship with users never ends well.

@Blendle: Add Business Punk / t3n and ix and I will use your service! :)

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