Feb

14

Assetbar is simplifying

February 14, 2008 |

Assetbar, a new online RSS feed reader, looks like it is taking some of the advice it has been getting from the blogosphere in the last few days and is working on simplifying its service.

Why?

Let me show you a screen shot of what they site looks like right now (click on the image for a larger version):

assetbar

Assetbar is a very powerful feed reader. It has functions to vote on a story, comment on a story, tag a story, there are recommendations, a social network, it will tell you who of your friends also saw an item, you can review a story by giving it a thumbs up or down (actually, that function is on the site twice for some reason), you can explain that vote, you can see who shared the story organized by how influential those sharers were, you can see the original story inline or in a new window. Under options, you even get the option to subscribe to other variations (Atom, RSS, Feedburner, site’s own RSS etc.) - why you would want to do that if you are already subscribed, I don’t know. Oh, and there are statistics for every feed and user, too.

You get the point, Assetbar is very, very powerful as a feedreader, but it’s UI is a mess. It wants to pack so much information onto the screen that you just want to run screaming back to Google Reader’s simplicity of design, even if Google Reader doesn’t have half the functionality.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to trash Assetbar but (in what I admit is somewhat of a backhanded way) to praise them for listening and making the necessary changes:

So the bottom line is that we are really excited to improve Assetbar UI so it’s simpler and easier. And kill all the JS cruft that makes rendering slow. Our team can make that happen, if I get out the way and don’t screw it up.

I’m happy to hear that because technically they are closer than anybody else in offering a strong competitor to Google Reader or NewsGator.

They could simply start by making the text field for the discussions and tagging under every post disappear until it is clicked, for example. They could stop showing the vote buttons twice. The “show original post inline/in new window” option should just be a click on the headline with the choice of what the default behavior is set in the general settings.


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