Google released a new version of Google Reader, and the reactions are very positive, see TechCrunch post. It has a nice UI. There are many readers and aggregators that are as good or even better as Google reader, however, since it is Google, many people may use it simply for the reason of having most of their services with one provider.
While reading comments on TechCrunch, it surprised me that some people even use Netvibes as a feed reader. I subscribe to about 100 feeds. I know many people who subscribe to a lot more. Netvibes gives you these small boxes, one box per feed. I find scanning hundreds of headlines in tens or even hundreads of tiny boxes gets blurry very quickly.
In my opinion (biased, of course), all these readers and aggregators lack an important function: auto-scan the feeds and identify the emerging topics that match the user’s interest. That is what I call topic discovery and it is what Wizag’s personalized topic discovery engine does. With Wizag’s Discoverer, a user can quickly see what topics are being talked about in the feeds he subscribe, and get to the posts that cover a topic of interest with one click.
This is in contrast to all the readers and aggregators which simply pile the posts up in your inbox, and you would have to read hundreds and hundreds of headlines to know what are being talked about and find the ones of interest to you.
This is different from a “smart folder” that filters out posts containing pre-defined keywords. That is easy to do. What is hard is to find the emerging topics (thus, you do not know what they are beforehand), and ranked them according to a user’s attention.
