Credit: By Subarcticmike on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
A Google Reader alternative called Rivered, which is based on the idea of consuming feeds of news in a Twitter-like stream, was launched at the weekend.
Rivered – available at Rivered.io – has been created by a team at PXi Ventures, a technology incubator founded by Xenophin Lategan, who was News International's chief technology officer until four months ago, and before that worked at Google and Microsoft.
Lategan introduced Rivered in a presentation at Digital Media Europe, a three-day conference taking place in London. He also explained how Shoreditch-based PXi Ventures launched Vinepeek, a site which broadcasts newly created 'Vines', the six-second videos created on the app launched by Twitter in January.
The new RSS reader launched on Sunday (14 April), one month after Google announced it was axing Reader.
"We take the concept of Twitter, where you stream news to a user, and we stream your RSS feeds to you," Lategan told Journalism.co.uk.
The site has been designed with mobile in mind, with the expectation that many people will use it as a second screen to monitor news in the same way they would Twitter.
"The idea is you log in to Rivered and just like you would use Twitter, you don't try and catch up on all your feeds. You look at your feeds and they stream to you like a continuous 'river' of feeds," Lategan explained.
Rivered costs $2 a month (£1.35) or $20 a year to use. If you do not sign up for a subscription you simply see "a sample 'river' of some popular news websites", the site explains.
Users can add feeds and share via Twitter, Facebook, Buffer and email, and save to Pinboard or Pocket.
Rivered also allows you to import your Google Reader feeds. To do this sign up for an account, export your Google Reader feeds by following these instructions, and then in Rivered click on 'import OPML', choose the XML file you downloaded from Google Reader and hit 'upload'.
The new RSS reader launched in beta on Sunday and a notice on site warns that the OPML import feature is "experimental". We tested it and were able to import feeds from Google Reader without any problems.
Rivered follows two previous products created since the launch of PXi Ventures just a four months ago. One is Tagstar, a community of Instagram users, the other is Vinepeek.
PXi Ventures launched Vinepeek just hours after Vine was announced. Like many other software companies, the three developers at PXi are given time to work on projects they want to work on rather than core products. Google, for example, has "20 per cent time", and the trio of engineers at PXi spend Fridays working on off diary ideas.
On Friday 25 January Twitter launched Vine and the team spent the afternoon building a site that broadcasts recent Vines, mashing them together in a channel.
The following day the site received 200,000 unique users, with 2,500 people per second logging on to watch the Vines, Lategan said, partly thanks to the new site being picked up by various technology sites and news outlets.
He added that analytics show that 78 per cent per cent of Vinepeek viewers are from the US, with Twitter driving 33 per cent of traffic. He explained that where Twitter provides traffic in the minutes after a tweet is posted, Facebook shares provide "a slow burner".
The average time on site is 4 minutes 15 seconds, which is time to watch 42 six-second Vines.
A little over two months since launch and Vinepeek now has nearly 1 million users. It has also tested an idea to monetise.
The PXi team put out a Google Form asking Vinepeek users to indicate whether they would pay for their own channel, one which only provided Vines about sport, for example. The form laid out three options: a 'fun package' for $5, a 'pro package' that allows you to embed Vinepeak for $20 and an $1,000 package targeting event companies. The three options did not actually exist but 600 people used it to say they would pay to use Vinepeek, suggesting to the team at that it was worth adding the subscription options.
There are now 100 paying users, with an events company opting for the $1,000 package the first to sign up and pay.
For more on Vinepeek and on Rivered, see Xenophin Lategan speaking to Journalism.co.uk technology editor Sarah Marshall in the video below.
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