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Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

blog.newsblur.com

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Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#13

Post by Maxious »

mynegation wrote: post #9

I wonder what Samuel's attitude towards taking external financing is. Because NewsBlur is having a hell of a momentum on Google Reader news (pun not intended).

NewsBlur was funded as part of YCombinator Summer '12 http://blog.ycombinator.com/newsblur-yc-s12-takes-feed-readi... http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurbl...

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#15

Post by recuter »

mynegation wrote: post #9

I wonder what Samuel's attitude towards taking external financing is. Because NewsBlur is having a hell of a momentum on Google Reader news (pun not intended).

Well now that he has a graph pointing up and to the right he can certainly raise money and collect developers as if they were Pokemon and play games with the valuation in the hopes that somebody Acquihires Newsblur or buys them for some opaque strategic reasons.

Maybe Google will buy them! :)

Edit: I kid, but that's actually a possibility in my mind and would be an ironic outcome. Maybe Facebook or Yahoo or somesuch will see the value of having the New Reader. Selfishly, I am hoping for something else.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#16

Post by mynegation »

conesus wrote: post #8

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky. (From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html ) The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. As…

I tried to install NewsBlur, but instructions were not very helpful. I tried to get as far as I can, editing fabfile and installing gajillions of new python modules, but still failed.

Don't get me wrong, it is wonderful and very commendable of you to open source NewsBlur! Nor do I feel entitled to the source code or free ride (I will probably end up paying for the hosted solution). Just providing some feedback, given that you indicated that low barriers to entry are important to you.

I am not a web developer so that can partially explain my struggle with fabric, Django and multitude of webdev and devops modules that you use.

I wish you good luck and I hope that you take this wonderful product even further.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#17

Post by codexon »

conesus wrote: post #8

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky. (From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html ) The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. As…

This analogy seems to be describing a different principle. Microsoft was trying to break the network effect that Lotus had.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#19

Post by jpwagner »

So far I am not a user of ANY reader. Between googlenews, twitter, and HN I get my daily digest.

I would like to try Newsblur but it seems that to get immediate value I have to have been some reader user: I can migrate my googlereader account or upload an OPML file.

What I would like to see are different versions of OOTB "skins". I can sign up as an "HN-lover" and it seeds my account with 50 blogs I should follow. Then I can actually evaluate the product.

Also note that free accounts are not actually disabled. If you leave the session when you hit the paywall and login from the homepage, you now have a free account.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#20

Post by conesus »

mynegation wrote: post #16
conesus wrote: post #8

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky. (From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html ) The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. As…

I tried to install NewsBlur, but instructions were not very helpful. I tried to get as far as I can, editing fabfile and installing gajillions of new python modules, but still failed. Don't get me wrong, it is wonderful and very commendable of you to open source NewsBlur! Nor do I feel entitled to the source code or free ride (I will probably end up paying for the hosted solution). Just providing some feedback, given…

This is something I'll be working on soon enough. There are many, many dependencies (not only for the web app, but there are three DBs that you have to have installed as prerequisites - mongo, postgres/mysql, and redis).

The real problem with setting up your own instance of NewsBlur is that you'll have to do your own feed fetching. This is effectively what you're paying for when you pay for NewsBlur. Let me break it down.

500 feeds updated once every five minutes is 144,000 feed fetches a day. Couple that with the original page and icon fetches, you're looking at almost two feeds every second just to keep your feeds up to date. And the average feed takes 5 seconds to completely update (feed, page, differences in stories, updating unread counts). So you have to run 10 processes in parallel, and that's already beyond the capabilities of most single machines. Then good luck keeping your DBs running clean and backed up.

Or you could pay $2 / month and never have to worry about setting up a very big stack. And you get the social community of shared stories on newsblur.com.

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