Ping.it: An RSS reader that lets you create tailored feeds by keywords and popularity
With Google ringing the death knell for its RSS Reader application, the July 1 curtain call has kicked a number of companies into action as they vie for the market left by Google Reader’s closure.
Digg has already thrown its hat into the ring, as it plans to build an RSS app with the best of Google Reader’s features. And Feedly is benefiting too.
Earlier this week, another RSS service opened in public beta called Ping.it, offering an interesting feature called ‘Probes’ which lets users create very specific feeds based on keywords and popularity.
Ping.it and probes
Ping.it launched initially in private beta back in December, before Google revealed it was pulling the plug on Reader. At its most basic level, Ping.it is an RSS reader. But it’s the new Probes feature that’s particularly interesting.
For example, if you only want to receive feeds on “YouTube videos on Reddit with more than 1,000 Likes”, you can create a Probe that taps both YouTube and Reddit to present this information directly in your feed.
Without creating a Ping.it account, all you can really do is subscribe to probes created by other users.
Click ‘Subscribe’ next to anything that takes your fancy, and you’ll be presented with a stream containing very specific news stories.
But the real value here lies in being able to create Probes yourself. For this, you’ll need to create an account, after which you can search for probes by keywords (and subscribe to them), or create your own.
To create a Probe, you can do so simply by keywords, Facebook Likes or YouTube Likes. Or all three.
You then have to include the RSS URL for each site you wish to monitor, separated by a comma. Then, stipulate what keywords you wish to track and how many Facebook Likes, for example, is your minimum requirement.
Then, it will appear in your main feed along with any other ones you’ve subscribed to. Here, you can see I created a Probe for posts from the TNW Shareables channel with more than 20 Facebook LIkes.
It’s worth noting here you can also copy existing Probes from other users and re-appropriate the parameters to suit your own requirements, changing the minimum number of ‘Likes’, for example.
Ping.it is selling itself as more of a social community than a simple RSS reader, with users able to connect with each other and share user-curated feeds. It’s a nice idea for sure, offering a neat way of filtering through the RSS rubble, though curiously it doesn’t offer any kind of Twitter filtering feature, which seems like a glaring omission. But it has just opened in public beta, so there is plenty of time to iterate and include further parameters.
Ping.it is headquartered in Norway, and is founded by Oslo-based hacker and entrepreneur Marius Lian. “We’ve all experienced the problem of having too much information online,” says Lian. “Reader tools are useful for managing information, but often lack the ability to tailor the content to the users’ specific requirements.”
Ping.it is in public beta now.
➤ Ping.it
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Shopping Feed Implemenation On WordPress site | Elance Job
Hi,
We have a new shopping site that we require a shopping feed implemented on. The site and design will be similar to pricecaptive.com, and is built in WordPress.
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custom word press plugin | Elance Job
i want a custom wordpress pluging to create an xml feed that displays all site posts, i want to be able to select what items from the posts (post name, post description, custom field 1, custom field 2 etc) are displayed in the xml feed from the p…
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Rockmelt Will Shut Down Social Browser To Focus On Funneling The Web Into Its New Content Feed Site
“Distributing a desktop browser is hard and expensive (especially if you don’t have an operating system or the world’s most trafficked website to promote it)” says Rockmelt, so today it announced it will soon stop supporting its social browser. As consolation, existing users (and those with TechCrunch’s invite link) can access the private beta of its new site that ports its content feed apps to the web.
Rockmelt was founded in 2009 with an ambitious mission: to reimagine the web browser for the social era. As an alternative to bookmarks, the left and right edges of of the Google Chromium-based browser housed a buddy list of online friends to chat and share with, and a stack of icons for your favorite sites and social networks that displayed counters for how many times they’d be updated since your list visit. The idea was to relieve you of having to manually check your Facebook, Twitter, and bookmarked page for new content in an endless loop.
Losing The Browser War
Users who picked up Rockmelt had strong engagement with tons of clicks to these app edges each day. But it just couldn’t seem to make a dent in the marketshare of Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Meanwhile it was burning money trying. Luckily a formal product development partnership that some believed was a pre-cursor to an acquisition helped the startup raise a $30 million Series B from a A-list investors Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and First Round Capital.
By October 2012 it only had 4 million registrations, and decided to refocus on a new concept, that content should be delivered to you rather than hunted for, and a new medium, mobile. It launched Rockmelt For iPad and later for iPhone, which fed social updates from friends and posts by sites you subscribe to into a Pinterest-style masonry grid of visual tiles. This apps harnessed the strengths of the small screen, offering a laid-back content browsing experience where you never have to type. While they didn’t rocket to the top of the charts, the team tells me they have hundreds of thousands of users that are highly engaged.
In the end, Rockmelt realized it had lost the browser war. While it knew gaining traction for a desktop browser would be tough, the team writes it didn’t foresee it would end up spending 50% of its development time on keeping Rockmelt up to date with the latest build of Chromium, the open source browser framework Rockmelt piggybacks on. So today it confessed “at some point in the next several months we will end-of-life the browser. Well before that point comes, we will give you plenty of notice and help you transition all your stuff like bookmarks.”
But The Mobile Battle Has Just Begun
Rockmelt refuses to die though. Ditching the browser was more like cutting off a gangrenous limb than suicide. Now it has a new mission “to help people navigate the web better”, co-founder and CTO Tim Howes tells me. He explains that at first the web was navigated through URLs, then portals, then search, until now where there’s “much more of a lean-back experience where our friends curate content for us.”
Rockmelt been championing that shift on mobile, but today it unveils a web version of its content feed apps. Howes explains that at first. You can watch a quick demo of the new Rockmelt.com private beta below, or use this special invite link for early access courtesy of TechCrunch.
Once you connect your social accounts, you’ll get a big grid of tiles displaying headlines and images for stories piped in from your Facebook and Twitter contacts plus Pages, accounts, and websites you follow. The endless visual stream is sleek and snappy, as co-founder and CEO Eric Vishria says the site “pushes the limites of HTML5 and JavaScript”. Click one and it opens in a “web view” when possible — a quick-loading stripped down version of the destination site overlaid on Rockmelt.
The main feed is solid for reading all your favorite content in one place, but doesn’t help you expand your tastes. Luckily there are the Explore and Popular feed. Explore lets you choose from dozens of categories to see stories from a curated list of relevant publishes. So if you click Tech, you’ll see updates from TechCrunch, Wired, The Guardian’s tech section, and more without having to individually subscribe to them. Vishria describes the Popular feed as a “visual Reddit” where you can see the top stories as determined by engagement from Rockmelt users. There’s a Friends feed and search option to, and at any point you modify your set of subscriptions.
If you’re a news junkie or are constantly looking for entertainment/education/distraction, you might enjoy Rockmelt.com and its iOS apps. The mobile versions both got a big update today that’s supposed to make them twice as fast plus adds more color, @mentions, hashtagging, and a pictures feed.
The question is whether Rockmelt can uproot our web browsing behavior. Many people have entrenched patterns of clicking their bookmarks and scanning their dedicated social feeds. While Rockmelt might be a bit more efficient and visually appealing, it’s current direction might not be quite groundbreaking or viral enough to attract a large audience. It’ll need one so that when it eventually starts monetizing (I’m guessing through sponsored content tiles), it can make enough money to stay afloat and eventually pay back the $40 million it’s raised.
For now, though, it’s reassuring to see the startup admit failure in the browser market but persevere. And as we move into the tablet and smart TV era, turning the web into a laid-back channel to be watched could get people to finally sit up and take notice of Rockmelt.
Use TechCrunch’s invite link to check out Rockmelt.com, and download RockMelt for iPad or iPhone
Tint Gives Businesses An Easy Way To Bring Social Media Feeds To Their Websites, Apps And Facebook Pages
Last year, Tim Sae Koo, Nikhil Aitharaju, Eunice Noh and Ryo Chiba launched HypeMarks to give people a less hectic way to consume social media. The startup aggregated tweets, articles, links and more shared by influencers and celebrities on social media accounts and, by grouping those by topic, aimed to give people a snapshot of an industry through the eyes of the people who know it best.
Although the USC grads were able to generate some interest and raise a small round of seed funding from Bill Gross and Idealab, the service never quite took off. Using the social media aggregation technology they’d developed for HypeMarks, they shifted their focus to take a B2B approach to social media aggregation. In December, they launched Tint — a simple, DIY platform that helps brands aggregate, curate and display social media feeds from multiple networks on their websites, in their mobile apps, Facebook pages and event displays.
In other words, Tint’s platform is designed to help brands create social hubs on top of their digital properties and, in turn, create a deeper level of engagement with their audiences. The idea is that, while there are a number of social media aggregators out there, the average consumer tends to gravitate towards one particular social network and, once there, tends to do their socializing and interacting on that network, rather than switching between them.
Tint allows businesses and brands to connect their social network accounts with their websites, in part to help them promote their products and services through their social feeds, but also to provide their websites with more engaging content. Businesses can link their Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and RSS feeds to their Tint accounts, whereupon the service auto-populates the page from those feeds, serving the social content in a river that is Pinterest-like in design.
Or, perhaps the better analogy is Flipboard, as each piece of content is given a headline, an excerpt and a photo, served in a create-your-own social magazine sort of layout. Users can then personalize their pages by changing fonts, background colors and so on or change the headline, URL and image of each piece of content. Tint also offers a handful of starter templates (on of which is free) in case you want to get started quickly.
After that’s done, you can embed the product on your site, tweaking the code to customize it for your site or page, whether it be WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly or some other. Tint also allows you to choose the dimensions you want the embedded stream to be and the number of cascading columns you want to appear, automatically serving up the embed code. Take that to your blog, page, drop it in, and bingo, bango, bongo, you have a social feed on your website that is automatically updated every time you tweet or post cat pictures to Facebook.
Admittedly, Tint probably sounds a little bit like Rebelmouse, but Sae Koo tells us that there are a few differences: Namely, Tint enables you to display social media feeds from specific hashtags, YouTube channels and Pinterest boards to help keep your users on your website, app or event (and engaged). Plus, he says, Tint wants to be a platform tool and an aggregator, not a publishing CMS — and one that’s easy to use and takes 10 minutes to set up. The alternatives, he says, are generally expensive, custom solutions that take time to implement and integrate.
While it may not sound earth-shattering, in the four months since launch, Tint has started to build some traction. Over 10,000 brands are actively using Tint on their sites, averaging 2.5 million monthly pageviews and has been doubling revenue and user growth month-over-month. Today, Tint’s clients include Enrique Iglesias, Toni Braxton, a number of NFL and NBA teams, Honda and more, and its 10,000 clients have averaged a 10 to 15 percent increase in traffic, 20 to 30 percent increase in time spent on their site and 12 to 18 percent decrease in bounce rate, the founders tell us.
Next up, Tint will be looking to expand its partnerships with digital agencies, build out its templates and customization options and finish raising its seed round.
Find Tint at home here.