Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

I just received my Attensa private beta activation for their new online RSS aggregator and jumped over to check it out.

Long story short, I’m not too impressed but I’d like to stay optimistic. I really hate giving negative reviews so I’ll try to keep this as constructive as possible. One obvious disclamer is that I’m a share-holder in Rojo (since I’m a co-Founder).

Good stuff first. There’s a cool new feature that I haven’t seen in another aggregator before. There’s an RSS/Web toggle that allows you to easily switch between the RSS view (text only) to the web view (permalink and HTML) which is kind of cool. NetNewsWire sort of has this with their tab view. I’m not sure if this is a power feature or not.

Here’s a screenshot of this functionality.

One big obvious problem is that they don’t support RSS auto-discovery. This should be their number one priority I would think. The first thing you do within an RSS aggregator is add feeds and if this doesn’t work it’s the first which will cause people to run away. For example if I enter ‘feedblog.org’ within NetNewsWire or Rojo it just works. Within Attensa I have to enter the full feed URL. If you enter the short URL it will get stuck and constantly say “downloading” …

The other problem I notice is that they’re trying to use Ajax but not in a good way (more like in a Web 1.0 way). For example their ‘manage feeds’ UI exposes itself through a popup window. The problem is that it’s a DHTML popup window. The first thing I tried to do is move it out of the way by dragging the title bar. Of course this doesn’t work because it’s not a real UI widget. This problem further manifest itself in other areas. For example if I want to view a feed in a new tab I’m just out of luck.

I keep seeing this problem duplicated over and over again. Will we ever learn? Microsoft also has this problem on live.com which I pointed out to them while I was at the Syndicate conference last week.

If you want to extend the browser and innnovate fine but do not break existing UI behavior. I think we need a Hippocratic Oath for Ajax developers.

Here’s a screenshot of their manage feeds UI.

The RSS aggregation space is just too crowded to enter the market now with mediocre features. You have to do something whizbang to differentiate and compete with the big boys (GYMA). I just don’t see anything here that isn’t already in NetNewsWire, Rojo, Bloglines, or any other aggregator out there.

Luckily for Attensa they have funding and will hopefully take my feedback as constructive, rev their beta, and introduce new whizbang features that will wow us all.