

Show HN: A Kick-ass Google reader replacement - swarmiq
http://www.swarmiq.com/register/askhn
Hi Guys,
      We're been hard at work building SwarmIQ, a Google Reader replacement over the last several months. We would love to get feedback from the HN community. Do give us a whirl and let us know what's missing and what can be improved.
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RobertHoudin
Looks like the creator of this website has a history of using sockpuppets when
he posts on HN.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4514376>

Strange how people create new accounts just to say positive things about this
site...

~~~
swarmiq
Hi Robert, Is there something wrong with asking one's friends to sign up and
share their experiences and give us an upvote. Not sure why you're going
through all this trouble to figure out what is generally an obvious thing for
any site seeking traction to do.

~~~
RobertHoudin
"Is there something wrong with asking one's friends to sign up and share their
experiences and give us an upvote."

If you aren't aware of why asking your friends to post reviews about your site
(without disclosing their relationship to you) is unethical, I'm not sure I
can explain that to you.

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jack-r-abbit
I need to see a free demo of it before I'll sign up. With Google shutting down
Reader, plenty of people have come out of the woodwork with "the best Reader
replacement" that turns out to not be that great (or at least not the way _I_
use reader). It does both of us a disservice if I sign up, use it for 5
minutes and then never return.

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seanieb
Some screen shots would be nice to look at before I sign up.

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jvzr
Dear swarmiq, can we have screenshots or better yet a demo site to see how
your product is "kicking ass"? The landing page isn't looking great and tells
me little about what's so great...

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phasevar
Is it Google Reader API compatible? I have an iPhone app that talks to Google
Reader that I want to get migrated to another service.

~~~
swarmiq
We currently do not have a Google Reader compatible API that can serve as a
swap-in replacement for your iPhone app. We're working on building an API and
should have it ready for use in the coming weeks.

------
swarmiq
Hi Guys, Per your requests, We've added screenshots to the landing page at
www.swarmiq.com. Hope that helps.

\--Team@SwarmIQ

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dylangs1030
Some constructive criticism:

• Users can be reasonably expected to browse a landing page before committing
to signing up or demoing software, but they can _not_ be reasonably expected
to sign up or go through a series of pages to _then_ see the pictures and cool
reasons to join

• Corollary to my first point, this isn't "cool" enough - by that I mean,
NewsBlur for example has a vibrant, expressive, slick landing page. It also
details _much_ more information than this landing page does. It gives readers
an incentive to actually sign up and check out the service, if not use it
completely. This does not give solid reasons that differentiate it from
competitors

• Segue from my last point, what's the wow factor? What's different about
Swarm that competitors like NewsBlur don't have?

• What are you doing that shaves off the disadvantage of being a late entry to
the race to replace Google Reader (by several months)? This is a not
insignificant harm to your traction potential if you can't figure out a core
competency or feature the other competitors don't have. It will be very
difficult to displace NewsBlur and Feedly at this rate.

This isn't meant to discourage you. Just wondering.

~~~
swarmiq
Hi Dylangs, Thank you for your valuable feedback.

\- Screenshots: We're going to have those up on the home page shortly.

\- Differentiated User experience: We've really worked hard at making it as
easy as possible for users to fulfil certain tasks. Our objective is to have
the functionality be self-evident and not require a manual or a help page to
use the website. We have some pretty powerful customization options.

\- This is a great point. We're just about coming to parity w.r.t Google
reader-like functionality and we're late. However we believe our next release
which will focus on personalization and making greater use of user training
data will set us apart and deliver highly tailored relevant news to our users,
cutting down the clutter.

~~~
greenyoda
_"Our objective is to have the functionality be self-evident and not require a
manual or a help page to use the website."_

Wouldn't that be a basic requirement for any well-designed mass-market web
application? I certainly didn't need any help pages to figure out Google
Reader or NewsBlur (which I'm very happy with, by the way) or any of the half-
dozen other RSS reader sites I've tried.

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nobullet
What's wrong with encoding other than ISO8859?

~~~
swarmiq
We are actively working on supporting other encodings and non-english RSS
feeds. However, we currently do not support encoding other than ISO8859.

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neofreko
why did it close the page once we submit the registration information? is this
site valid?

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yamalight
sooo, my russian rss feeds are completely broken. no unicode support?

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aioprisan
oh hey so it's closed source and could disappear just like google reader,
anytime, right?

