NewsBlur, the alternatives exist

What a good idea about feeds! You can put together all the sites you like and read them calmly, without having to periodically visit a site to see if something new has already appeared. I make very little use of feeds (around 40 sites, a little more or less), but I know of people who subscribe to more than 700 fonts. It is an astonishing number and surely, terrible to handle.

I am addressing a knowledgeable audience of Google Reader. The ubiquitous feed reader. But that does not make it the best, nor the most suitable. Above all, after the cut in social functions that he lost in favor of Google+ (what has already been written enough). To be honest, I never used them, so that wasn't the main reason I stopped using it. I stopped using it because I discovered (thanks to this text) NewsBlur and that comes to solve practically all my demands, at a stroke. Let's take a closer look at its characteristics, so you can see why I love it so much.

What's good about it?

Much. Starting with the design. Google Reader It was horrible when I left it and it may have improved a lot since then. But NewsBlur it is quite nice how it is now and the design is very clear and comfortable. Everything is set to be intuitive. Here appears the greatest difficulty and that is NewsBlur it is not translated. Not that there is much to understand, but some things would be great in other languages. Let's first see what the normal view looks like:

Nothing out of the ordinary. If they turn to the right they will find the feeds that I follow and that have news. Something wonderful about NewsBlur is the ability to read smartly. Marking the labels of publications, sites, authors and even words in the titles; we can rate each site and read more calmly, all filtered according to your personal preferences. At the bottom is the Switch that allows us to broaden or close the spectrum, to read only in green [what we should like the most], in yellow [normal] or whatever comes in all the feeds. Quite useful when you follow a particular site that updates too fast.

Now, if you turn to the left you will see the three views that you have NewsBlur: Original, Feed and Story. The Story view is a way to view the site within the feed reader. This is great, because it allows us to comment without exiting or escaping from feeds that only pass a part of the text. Or some that do not pass the images. Here in more detail:

And the Original view is the same, but it goes to the front page of the site and not the individual story. I guess this is useful when you visit a new site through the blurblogs, which I will explain later. Now let's focus on the sidebar:

In the black marks, we can understand how separators; they live the stories we save to read later or so they don't get lost in the flood of information. Immediately below, the blurblogs. These are the spaces where users share the stories in which we comment, although pressing the "Share" button is enough. As you can see, they can have proper names; many of them quite strange. And we can leave them as we want, with the colors that the same application offers us or with our own CSS, although I have not been able to test the latter.

And at the bottom, the feeds themselves, each stream with the amount of news in green or yellow it has. The intelligence of NewsBlur makes everything very pleasant. It is a very pleasant experience to classify something and have the contents just a click away.

There are also mobile applications. I use the official Android, but a long time ago an unofficial version known as blar. The official app crashes sometimes, but it's pretty good in general use. Is available for Android and to iOS in official versions, but I know of the existence of a client for MeeGo. The more the platform's user base grows, the better we will do with third-party applications.

After all these advantages, what are you waiting to try it? To stop depending on Google in favor of a newborn and very friendly community is completely feasible for me. A company (in the technology sector, surely) could subscribe to all the sources and blurblogs that it can and share the posts that suit you. A great business, you advertise yourself with other people's content and you are only sharing it. No plagiarism.

NewsBlur It is a start-up with little time on the road. A free account gives you the ability to follow 64 sites with one version premium for a price you can choose. It may be a somewhat tight limit, but we can help a new project that is coming to this world with force.

And best of all, it is free software. Not crazy would I recommend something exclusive around here and it is one of the best examples I know of innovation with open source licenses. Even mobile applications are published under the license MIT, which tells us about the commitment of samuel clay with the project. I am completely convinced to buy the subscription premium as soon as you exceed 64 sites, especially if you start using bitcoins too, as the main developer is considering.

If they want to enter, they can directly look for me to me or to the stories More popular of the site, which collects the best of our readings. It's still overcrowded with English speakers, but the more the merrier. It is demonstrated that the alternatives exist. And that you can recommend something that I love and that you will surely love too.

Register in the newsblur.com to start testing it, I forgot to give a link.