The all new ReadBurner

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I’m sort of late to this story, due to lack of internet connection yesterday, but I’m still happy to see ReadBurner back online. Like in the time when I started the project, the relaunch generated an amazing amount of blog coverage. This is something that really encourages us to keep pushing interesting stuff and I wanna thank all you guys out there.

I also wanna thank the ReadBurner team. The energy and passion they’re putting in is amazing and their future plans are too. Congrats guys!

My personal goal is to end my freelance work till the end of June and after that to jump fully back into the startup world. I will then continue to help out with ReadBurner but I also have plenty of new cool ideas (I recently had to turn down two invitations to YCombinator interviews due to this damn contract work I’m bound to).

Anyway. Have fun with the all new ReadBurner and don’t forget to burn your Linkblog.

Can you tell me some twitter secrets?

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Laugh about me but it took me till recently to somehow understand what I should do with twitter. I registered my account about 1 year ago but I’m actively using it only since a few weeks. Currently I’m wondering about a few things and I hope you can enlighten me somehow:

  • Do you just follow anybody that follows you? (eg. It doesn’t make sense to me to follow people who post in languages I don’t understand.)
  • Are you turning device updates on for everyone or do you have some criteria for doing that?
  • I’m currently using twhirl. What clients do you use/recommend?
  • What do you really use twitter for: tracking news, communicating, self promotion (coug, Jason Calancanis, cough), other…
  • What else can you tell me?

To all those Google Reader alternatives

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I like Google Reader, I use it several hours a day. I even build a successful project on top of this wonderful piece of software. BUT: I’m really open to alternatives. There are a lot of things that I don’t like about Google Reader and there are tons of things you could improve around it (make it social), but Google is sometimes painfully slow at that.

Louis Gray has 2 post of  RSS Readers, which I tried out and really find interesting:

While I like where Shyftr and AssetBar are heading to, there are really 2 killer things that prevent me from using them long-term

  1. List view
    I can’t and I don’t want to read through all articles. I decide solely on the source and the title wheter I open an article to read it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but neither AssetBar nor Shyftr are offering a list view and for me that’s a real killer.
  2. Mobile view
    I read lots of my feeds on my mobile phone (Nokia 6131 with Opera Mini 4). Next week I will switch to the iPhone and therefore my mobile RSS reading will likely even rise.

My suggestion: Improve on the Google Reader UI, copy some of the cool stuff from FriendFeed, implement a social layer around it and provide a plain simple mobile site.

Don’t worry Louis

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Louis Gray expressed some concerns that the recent ReadBurner acquisition may cause a conflict of interest, since Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief at Mashable, has been involved.

I can tell you one thing, Louis: These guys are really into this RSS sharing thing and love that product. We are currently collecting lots of cool ideas and I’m really looking forward to the re-launch.

From what I’ve seen so far – with this new formed team ReadBurner has more than ever the chance to evolve into a mass appealing web site, mainly based on innovation and (hopefully) with the support of all you bloggers and users out there.

ReadBurner acquired

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I’m happy to announce that ReadBurner has been acquired and will therefore live on!

The buyers include Adam Ostrow (editor in chief at Mashable), Drew Olanoff (former technology evangelist at Pluggd)  and Eric Kerr (creator of TinyLoad).

Drew and Adam contacted me last week, 1 day after I officially announced to close  ReadBurner. I got tons of mails to keep up the project and also a few requests of people who wanted to acquire ReadBurner. After some email discussions and phone calls, I decided to go with Drew, Adam and Eric because they understand and like the concept of sharing items through Google Reader as much as I do. Moreover they obviously have the skills and the resources to build a compelling web product.

The best part for me: I’m not leaving ReadBurner, they asked me to stay on their board of Advisers! I think ReadBurner now has a real bright future and I’m very excited.

Read the official announcement on Mashable.
Visit ReadBurner

ReadBurner is no longer availiable

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I’m sorry to announce that ReadBurner is no longer availiable.

The reason is that I just don’t have time to keep the site up and running, because of some freelance projects that I cannot drop out.

I really want to thank all of you guys for supporting me, giving me feedback and visiting ReadBurner. It’s been very exiting to run a website that got so much Buzz from the blogosphere in such a short period of time.

If you are still interested in the idea of ReadBurner I suggest you to try out RSSmeme which is a very well done clone of ReadBurner developed by Benjamin Golub.

ReadBurner.com
Just in case somebody is interested in buying the domain ReadBurner.com or the technology, I’m open for offers (it got tons of referals). Contact me: alexander.marktl@gmail.com

I really like the Internet

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Sorry for being quiet in the last week but I had to do some important things. I just wanted to let you know one thing: I really like the Internet. In the net people never sleep, always innovate and want to make the world a better place…

I’m gonna write more tomorrow. Have to spend some time with my girlfriend now 😉

Meanwhile:
– Kudos to Louis Gray for keeping us updated on maybe the hottest thing of early 2008: Linkblogs

– Congrats to Benjamin Golub for creating a cool (and in some things better) ReadBurner clone

– Another project to think of: LinkRiver

ReadBurner will be back very soon :-)

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I’m currently refetching items. That takes a lot of time.

What have I changed:

1. The new db Model (hopefully) supports better scaling performance

2. The userid will now be the Google id and not just a random number.

3. I can now do some new language filtering tricks. It’s lickely that the language filter gets worse at first until I have time to build some algorithms.

4. Double counting items from a user should happen no more. From now on I really know exactly what you guys are sharing 😉

5. To be honest: When the site leaked I parsing tags was not integrated. That’s why no such feature has been available. I’m now parsing them and will soon release something like a tag cloud.

6. When I solved scaling (could take some time) I will start fetching shared items as far back as possible.

Well, so far so good. The parser really has a hard time re-fetching all those items, so please be patient with me…