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Show HN: A Kick-ass Google reader replacement (swarmiq.com)

7 points by swarmiq ↗ HN
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.

26 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 79.7 ms ] thread
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.
seanieb
Some screen shots would be nice to look at before I sign up.
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.

boon
They're still not there.
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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RobertHoudin
User created 10 minutes ago.

Hmmmm...

neofreko
well, i just created this user after i sign up to that site and getting a wtf moment and freaked out because i can't sign in to my gmail .. anyone successfully registered?
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swarmiq
Hi, Please let us know if you're still having trouble signing up. We're seeing registrations coming through successfully.

SwarmIQ

neofreko
OK, now it recognizes me and I can see inside the app. Closing browser window upon registration process did freak me out.
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.
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.

neofreko
why did it close the page once we submit the registration information? is this site valid?
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swarmiq
This is completely unsubstantiated speculation and completely untrue. Could you please refrain from spamming our post with these comments.
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...
yamalight
sooo, my russian rss feeds are completely broken. no unicode support?
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.
aioprisan
oh hey so it's closed source and could disappear just like google reader, anytime, right?
swarmiq
Hi Guys, Per your requests, We've added screenshots to the landing page at www.swarmiq.com. Hope that helps.

--Team@SwarmIQ