

Ask HN: Are you building a Google Reader workalike? - Toshio

Hello community!<p>When Google announced they would discontinue Reader, many of you stated your intentions to start developing an alternative.<p>How is your project going?<p>Post an update here.
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mindcrime
We aren't exactly building a "Google Reader workalike" but we do have a
project[1] that is very much based on consuming and aggregating RSS feeds.
It's a different model though, as the central abstraction is a "channel"
(think "topic" or "subreddit") where a "channel" aggregates _n_ RSS feeds, as
well as any manually submitted content.

Think of what you would have if you could take a subreddit and point it to a
bunch of RSS feeds and have it pull that content in automatically.

That said, we already have the ability to do freeform tagging, and it occurred
to me last night that we could leverage the tagging support to build an
interface for interacting with the feeds, that would act more like a
traditional feed reader. I can't promise that we're going to add that, but
it's on my mind.

Note that we aren't currently pursuing a SaaS application model... this is
based on a "install and host it yourself" model - because our real focus in on
enterprise use, and we expect people to consume feeds from things like their
CRM system, document management system, internal blogs, etc. as a primary use
case.

Also, as a side note, I think Dave Winer has some interesting thoughts here[2]
for anybody considering building a new Reader.

[1]: <https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick>

[2]: <http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/march/theIdealRssReader>

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ZaneClaes
We just released our API to allow others to build tools even more powerful
than Google Reader. We're not interested in building our own client, but we
think our API could let others create beautiful news readers with deep social
integration. <https://streamified.me/developer/>

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dualboot
I was building a system in early 2004 that crawled and cached RSS feeds to
collate them into streams for users based on subscriptions. My intention was
to have one set of crawlers bring things into a large cache that could be
accessed by a use base vs. having everyone constantly hitting up every website
for the latest RSS entries and reduce overall traffic (excessive RSS traffic
was an issue at the time) and to also provide people with consistent website
formatting (enhancing readability) and all of those other no-brainer things
that we take for granted now.

I'd progressed quite well and had a handful of people who were helping me test
it out thoroughly addicted to using it to consume the latest news from their
favorite sites.

I spent entirely too much time building in social features and essentially
recreating LiveJournal (Live Journal's ability to allow you to follow all of
your friends blogs in a somewhat clean format was my inspiration but applied
to any RSS source) and by the time I was ready to take it to the next level
Google announced Reader and I abandoned the project (beaten to market by
Google yet again)

I had other distractions that made it an easy decision but I guess I shouldn't
have given in so easily. Live and learn!

