Hacker News Reader

Comment by muglug | Hacker News Reader

Um, there are a ton of Google Reader replacements out there doing incredibly well in the wake of that announcement. Digg deciding to create their own product from scratch seems very stupid.

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I don't think it's stupid at all. I've yet to find an RSS reader for my needs. Newsblur is good looking but filled with useless features that I'll never use, The Old Reader is simple enough and I like its UI but it's not fast at all (meaning navigating between folders is pain in the ass and it fetches feeds extremely slowly). I subscribed to feedbin yesterday and canceled my subscription an hour later because it didn't even support folders. So there's not a great alternative for Google Reader out there yet. I believe Digg have the technical capability to create one and I like their goals.

They gotta build the system as fast as possible, though. I get that they're building the system from scratch, but by the time Google Reader is actually shut down, most people will settle down with other products.

Have you tried using any of them? Say what you will about Google Reader, but at least it didn't crash (most of the standalone apps) or require some sort of strange interpretive dance with your fingers to browse your articles and mark them as read (feedly).

There's definitely space here.

Right, but those apps nevertheless have a footprint and (hopefully) a codebase to improve upon. At this point in time Digg has none of that -- just a once-well-known brand and a new redesign that's failed to capture back the audience/community lost to Reddit and others. This looks more like a hail mary than a solid business decision.

The team currently behind Digg does have experience in this space, though: they previously developed News.me, a Flipboard-alike, shuttered when they decided to put all their resources into Digg.

Why is it stupid? Has anybody - yet - clearly become the RSS reader? Is there any reason to think that the Digg guys might not have some innovative ideas they could potentially deploy? Will their brand recognition alone not give them something of a "leg up" (even after a couple of years of irrelevance, people still remember the term "Digg").

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they will succeed at this, but I don't see the justification for calling the move "very stupid".

I would say it's far from stupid. Digg has brand recognition, additional exposure like TNW's article here will only help downloads. The brand has reach that can't be purchased. I'm speaking for me, but I think this may be the general consensus, too, we're all just waiting for a truly GREAT RSS reader. Digg has the opportunity to innovate here.

If they actually do a good job with it? This could be huge. Regardless, their product will do well.

And they are all terrible. Seriously, I have tried every single one of them, and none have the look and feel, and capability for instant updates of Google Reader.

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