Goodbits Blog

Yep we know, deploying on Friday is a bad idea, but we want you all to have this feature, so we're going ahead anyway.  All the tests pass, nice and green so why not.

Yep not just your twitter favorites

When a friend of yours favorites a new tweet that contains a link we automatically fetch it and add that to your reading list.  The results from this have been great and we think you'll love it, we do!

To enable it you don't have to do anything, if you've already added your twitter account. If you haven't simply add your twitter account and you're done.

Let us know what things appear in your reading list and what you think of it.

You'll only see a link once now

Every article whether it came from a feed, a user in Goodbits, a tweet or a favourite that your friend made, it will always show as one article in your reading list.

That one article in your reading list will then have a number of icons against it to indicate how important it is.

You can see here in the above screenshot that two people tweeted the link and then another friend of mine favorited it.

Trimming in Public – Part 1 | whatleydude

Start every morning by skimming through news, blogs, articles, etc. Much of this is tech related. I used to get tech news in the newspaper, then in Google Reader, and now mostly from Twitter. If someone I meet mentions something interesting that was published that I didn’t read, I go back and figure out how I missed it and change who I follow on Twitter so it doesn’t happen again.

Chris Dixon writes up his routine of where he gets his tech news from. We know a lot of people aren't used to RSS readers. And we know a lot of RSS fanatics get value out of Twitter.

We think good bits come from everywhere, so we'll be looking to plug in many different services.

Lots of feedback has been asking for something like the Google Reader sidebar which shows all the feeds you are subscribed to. We're determined to not just clone solutions, so keep the feedback coming on your use cases for this.

Best wishes to Kalv and Sharen and their new baby boy.

(via xkcd: Ablogalypse)

As I’ve been working to get our startup Goodbits up and running I’ve been using many different tools to get as much insight on our customers activity. The one tool that I’ve been using the most has been Kissmetrics which has allowed me to look at specific events or actions that a user carried out on the site. Making it far more useful than the popular choice of Google Analytics or similar.

It has been very important to learn what daily habits our users are carrying out, so the better information I can compile the better I can deduce common usage patterns that I have to improve and refine. Check out this post from Nir which is an interesting read on Habit forming.

Now there is a new kid on the block and I’m loving it. Intercom, a web app that is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Tool on my customers with some serious powerful features.

This is Kalv's blog post on how we're using Intercom and other tools to engage with the people that are early users of Goodbits.

We've really appreciated everyone's feedback as we reach out more directly to ask questions about how they're using the site.

The Verge interview: David Carr on curation, crowdsourcing, and the future of journalism | The Verge

This lead to a great discussion on Twitter kicked off by Matthew Ingram.

We have released 'Sections' to our reader. Yep like Google Reader folders.

Quite a lot of you have asked for it on our feedback site, you asked and we delivered.  We  investigated a couple of ways of doing this and believe we've implemented it in a way that you will like and hope to improve.

Simply login and go to your settings, you will see 'sections', here you can add/remove sections.

To add feeds to a section simply go to that section and you will be presented with a form to select multiple feeds.

Or when you are reading through your articles you will see a panel of sections you can easily click on:

Google Reader Accounts

You can re-import your subscriptions from Google and we will automatically create sections from what folders you had in Google Reader. So if you were waiting for this feature before completely leaving Google Reader, go on and add your feeds again.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Like with everything in our reader we've added keyboard shortcuts that allow you to switch sections easily.

Just press 'g' on your keyboard and then use the same 'j' to go down and 'k' to go up, then just press enter to go to that section.

OPML imports

Importing sections from OPML files has yet to be finished, if you want to accelerate this being finished please leave us feedback

Easily sort your reading list by the feed title or twitter.  We have found that by adding Twitter links the reading list has become a bit overwhelming, so how can we try and make it better to see interesting reads.

Step 1, we have implemented the filter by source, this is something I wanted to do anyway, so I can easily see new posts from a specific source.

Simply use the filter box at the top (switch to it easily using the keyboard shortcut of '/') and add "source:" followed by the name that you would like to filter.

If you need to filter by a feed that contains spaces surrond you feed title with quotes like so:

We haz icons now. Hopefully this will make it easy for you to see where an article came from.

If you don't see an icon for a feed where you think there should be then let us know.

We now have Twitter.

Sorry we've been a little quiet, lots of things are brewing and something has finally bubbled up to be released for you all.

Continuing on my mission to improve the reading experience of many I have realized (as you probably have too) that RSS is not our only source for information that we want to read.

One big source for me is Twitter, so why are those links of content not in my daily reader tool? Well it is now.

You can now enable your authenticated Twitter account under your settings and we will fetch content that contain links and add them to your reading list.

With a tweet in your reader simply press 'teleport' (or press 'o') to pull in the article in line to read it easily. Or if it doesn't format correctly click on it (or press 'v') to view the original site and let us know!

We are starting to move to a generalized view of where good reads come from so no longer are we talking about subscribing to RSS or feeds but to sources. These sources are many things today in our digital age.

Rather than quoting every second paragraph of Alex Kessinger's post, please click through and read the whole thing.

We agree with Alex' line of thinking. The concept of RSS - of subscribing to sources, to people, to topics - is more important than the technology underneath.

In fact, we're likely to rebrand at some point to remove RSS from our name (comments welcome on that one - we're struggling with it).

We do know that upcoming revisions to the-reader-formerly-known-as-RSS Hero will broaden beyond RSS and Atom.

Twitter, of course, but GitHub, Flickr photos, and other "streams" are all interesting sources.

(quote by Zach Seward on the News.me blog)

We built RSS Hero because we also "hunt for material on our own". If you truly want to learn, be inspired, or have an "ah ha!" moment, you need to feed your brain great stuff to read, and not just read what everyone else is reading.

Great post by Dave Winer.

As we think more about what we want RSS Hero to become, the phrase "active news reading" resonates.

Tired of seeing SOPA articles today?

Not that I'm against the cause, I believe it's very important what sites are doing today but having every news/blog talk about it is becoming distracting so I wanted to easily mark all these articles as read this morning.

So I just deployed a feature allowing you to filter your reading list with a title keyword. Simply add a keyword in the filter box at the top of your reading list and bam the reading list should update.  Even 'show:unread sopa' will work or 'yesterday apple' if you want to find something specific.  We will be building out this filtering mechanism to do full-text search over time depending on demand, so let us know feedback!