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Tag: digg reader

  • Digg Reader Rollout Starts Today, iOS App Coming Tomorrow

    As announced, today, June 26th, Digg is beginning to roll out their new Digg Reader in beta.

    The first invites have already gone out to their survey participants that gave them guidance on what kind of reader to build over the last few months. Now, Digg is sending out invites to those who have signed up for a peek at the beta.

    (If you’ve yet to do so, you can do it here)

    Digg reiterates that their new reader is primarily targeted at Google Reader refugees:

    “This beta version is aimed first and foremost at Google Reader users looking for a new home in advance of its imminent shutdown. Once you connect your Google Account, you’ll find all of your feeds and folders set up and ready to go. And even if you’re not a Google Reader refugee, come on in! You can build up your list of sources by browsing recommended publishers or searching for feeds via the “Add” button,” they say.

    Digg Reader beta launches with keyboard shortcuts, social media sharing, saving features, and recommendations for feeds to follow. In the future, Digg says they will add search, “mark as unread” feature, more sharing options, and data exporting.

    And we’re getting an app – tomorrow, they say. Well, iOS users are. Android users are going to have to wait. That’s one of Digg’s promises for the future, which they say will be completed by the end of next month.

    Once we have a chance to take a look, we’ll be back with a full walkthrough. For not, Digg joins a crowded list of RSS readers looking to replace the beloved (but not beloved enough) Google Reader – including AOL, who just launched their product earlier this week.

  • Digg Reader Beta Launching June 26th, Will Be Free

    Digg Reader, Digg’s RSS reader replacement for Google Reader, has been in the works for the past three months – really ever since Google announced that they’d be shutting down their own reader on July 1st. With the date fast approaching, Digg has finally unveiled more details about their new product.

    Digg Reader will launch next week “in phases,” and they say that everyone will have access by June 26th.

    Like before, Digg is emphasizing that their RSS reader will focus on speed, simplicity, and ease of transition for Google Reader users. And they’re focusing on power users:

    “Given the compressed time frame for this sprint, we decided early on that we needed to focus on one type of user. We asked ourselves who had most to lose from the shutdown of Google Reader, and the answer was fairly obvious: the power user, the people who depend on the availability, stability, and speed of Reader every day,” says Digg.

    Here’s what Digg says we can expect from Digg Reader, v.1:

    • Easy migration and onboarding from Google Reader.
    • A clean reading experience that gets out of the way and puts the focus squarely on the articles, posts, images, and videos themselves.
    • Useful mobile apps that sync with the web experience.
    • Support for key actions like subscribing, sharing, saving and organizing.

    In the future, the focus will shift to building an Android app and integrating with other services. Digg says that future version of their Reader will also sport search, notifications, and better sorting tools.

    Digg has previously hinted that their reader would be paid, or at least “freemium.” This is still true, but Digg says that the basic experience (plus some additional features) will be free.

    “We mentioned in a prior post that Digg Reader will ultimately be a ‘freemium’ product. But we’re not going to bait-and-switch. All of the features introduced next week, as well as many others yet to come, will be part of the free experience,” says Digg.

  • Digg Reader Will Not Be a Standalone App, Launching By the End of June

    Digg’s new RSS reader will be out in about a month – but it won’t be a standalone app.

    Instead, Digg’s new reader will simply be a part of Digg. Speaking at Internet Week New York, Digg CEO Andrew McLaughlin said that users will ”have one download, which is Digg, and the current Digg will have added onto it reader capabilities.”

    Oh, and yes, Digg’s reader will be called “Digg Reader.”

    Ever since Digg announced that they were working on their own reader, shortly after Google announced that they were killing Google Reader, the goal has been to build a replacement – something fast and simple that Google Reader users will want to adopt. Digg has said that apart from making it fast and simple, they really only want to make it synchronous across multiple devices and make it easy to import from existing Google Reader accounts.

    Digg’s own surveys have shown that users want very little changed about Google Reader.

    Another interesting thing that they found was that 40% of respondents said that they would pay for a Google Reader replacement – something that “pleased” them. They went on to say that they wanted their users ““to be customers, not our product.”

    “Free products on the Internet don’t have a great track record. They tend to disappear, leaving users in a lurch. We need to build a product that people can rely on and trust will always be there for them. We’re not sure how pricing might work, but we do know that we’d like our users to be our customers, not our product. So when we asked survey participants whether or not they would be willing to pay, we were pleased to see that over 40% said yes.”

    Although there’s no confirmation here, that makes it seem like Digg is at least strongly considering charging for Digg Reader. And if that’s the case, and it’s not even its own standalone app, is Digg just trying to charge people to use Digg?

    Anyway, McLaughlin confirmed that Digg Reader will launch by the end of June, just in time for the Google Reader kill date of July 1st. Hopefully for Digg, that’s not too late. By then, users will have had months to find a replacement, and there are certainly plenty out there.

  • Betaworks Follows Digg Purchase With Instapaper Acquisition

    Betaworks, the company behind Bit.ly, news.me, Chartbeat, and now Digg, has added Instapaper to is portfolio.

    Instapaper has served as a nice complement to news readers like Google Reader (or whatever you’re using these days). It’s great for when you find things you want to read later that you didn’t actually get to through your reader, and don’t have easy access to the star feature. With Digg building a Google Reader replacement of its own, it will be interesting to see if Instapaper plays a role.

    Of course some current alternatives to Google Reader basically render Instapaper unnecessary. Feedly, for example, offers its version of the Google Reader starring for any page you visit on the web, and adds it to your reader. Still, the addition of Instapaper could be a key element of Digg’s creation. Either way, people already known and like Instapaper, and it will continue to have its own user base.

    John Borthwick told TechCrunch in an email that Instapaper will be a “perfect fit with Digg and its forthcoming reader.

    Instapaper creator Marco Arment discusses the situation in a blog post:

    When I launched Instapaper in 2008, it was a very basic web app. It quickly expanded to define the pillars of the read-later market: a one-click “read later” bookmarklet, a web sync service, an adjustable text view optimized for reading, and an iPhone app with offline saving. I did almost everything myself, which worked well for the first few years, but for the past year, I’ve had a lot of trouble keeping up with it.

    Instapaper is much bigger today than I could have predicted in 2008, and it has simply grown far beyond what one person can do. To really shine, it needs a full-time staff of at least a few people. But I wouldn’t be very good at hiring and leading a staff, and after more than five years, I’d like an opportunity to try other apps and creative projects. Instapaper needs a new home where it can be staffed and grown, but I didn’t want to give it to a big company that would probably just shut it down in six months.

    Being familiar with Betaworks (apparently eating lunch at their office a lot), Arment figured they’d be the right company to acquire a majority stake in Instapaper. Betaworks evidently agreed.

    According to Arment, the deal is structured so that Instapaper will remain a top priority, and he will continue to advise the project indefinitely.

  • In Their Quest to Build a Google Reader Replacement, Digg Finds Users Want Very Little Changed

    You definitely know that Google is killing Google Reader. You’ve either seen or been part of the outrage. Google will be officially shuttering their popular (but not popular enough) product on July 1st, but as you would expect they’re slowly removing its presence to help ease us all into the transition.

    And you probably know that Digg is working to build a replacement. They announced this literally hours after Google made their announcement that they were killing the product. Digg has said from the start that they want to build something that’s fast and simple, and could serve as a true replacement for Google Reader.

    Today, Digg has published the results of a survey they sent out to over 17,000 people (8,000+ responses so far), which sought to uncover exactly what people want in the upcoming Digg Reader.

    And here’s the most important finding:

    What you’re looking at it a word cloud, charting the responses to the question “if there’s one thing you could remove from Google Reader, what would it be?”

    Nothing. Google Reader users don’t want anything more. They just want Google Reader. Or, since the second-most tracked word was “google,” they simply want a Reader that functions exactly like Google Reader – with or without Google’s hand.

    The survey feedback also uncovered some stats about RSS reader users, like most subscribe to a good number of feeds (roughly 70% subscribe to more than 51) and 80% check their feeds multiple times a day. Nearly 80% said that they use Google Reader for both work and play, and over 40% said that Google Reader is the only RSS reader that they use (the nest most popular feed reader was Feedly).

    Some of the feedback gave Digg an idea of what was most important to include in their upcoming reader. For instance, 67% said that they use keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader at least some of the time. That prompted Digg to proclaim that those are “definitely on the list.”

    On the flip side, there was search:

    “This was an interesting data point. While 25% reported never using search, over just over half said that they sometimes do. Search is a huge investment in terms of development time and infrastructure costs. We don’t yet know if we’ll have the necessary infrastructure up and running in time for our initial beta launch, but it’s definitely on the roadmap,” says Digg.

    There’s definitely going to be a hole in the market for a Google Reader-like reader come July 1st when it all goes dark – even with other options already available. Whether or not Digg can step up into that role remains to be seen. Let’s think positively.