nate Posted…

Oops, well apparently it can't tell relative from absolute links.

Jay Allen Posted…

At first I was skeptical. Why did the world need another web-based blog reader. And then, like just about everyone else I've heard talk about it, I started to like it. Not for myself, of course. I have bloglines. But I can see how the less techie would quickly grasp the headline news idea.

And the fact that RSS is barely mentioned on the site is a good move. Just put in the web addresses of your favorite sites. Everything else is seamless. They really did do a fine job of that.

nate Posted…

That's a good point Jay - it's aimed at the non-techie, and it does a good job with that aim. I think the most successful aspect of Kinja is the post formatting - I hope other services pickup that trend.

Scott Partee Posted…

So far, I say it's pretty cool, but on wobbly legs. Much like a newly-born fawn.

I like the idea of shared digests. I use Feed on Feeds to manage my RSS/ATOM subscriptions, but cannot share my links with "the world" due to security issues. Kinja handles this gracefully. But the problem: one digest per user is puny and too limiting. Also, I can see delicous combinations here. For example, you and I could create a theme-specific digest together, where both of us could add sites to it, and share that somehow. Lot's of good future potential uses here, and really one of the small handfull of advantages Kinja has over some of the other similarly-purposed products/sites.

Sometimes, it behaves strangely. The grouping of posts is odd. For example, one site's posts from the past two weeks suddenly show up all at once, and this disturbs the timeline of my digest quite a bit. I'd prefer everything to be date-based, with an easy click-on link to sort by source as necessary. Usability, in short, is still a bit "off." Overall, though, it looks great and is relatively easy to work -- key for the non-techies and people who like things that "just work."

Another small complaint I have is that I sent in my icon, the excellent 1/2 shield designed by Pepe, and it has not yet been associated, nor have I received notice that such association was rejected due to file format errors or whatnot. I don't really want to pester, but you'd think that after a couple weeks they'd have it a little bit more together than that.

Overall, I think it's nice. I'm not so certain I see a mass movement going on here, though. That'll happen when Microsoft integrates RSS/Atom/etc. autodiscovery into IE/Outlook/Outlook Express. But I could be wrong.

Nate Posted…

Yah I agree Scotty - it would be much nicer if that post-clumping problem was ironed out - hopefully that'll just be one of the things they work on to get the thing out of beta. I also think it's a little weird about emailing icons - i wonder if any of the emailed icons have even been used? The docs mention that they went ahead and made a bunch of icons for i guess highly popular sites. I emailed a WG icon on the same day I made this post, let's see when it gets activated.