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Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

getprismatic.com

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Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#51

i cant say enough positive things about prismatic. i have been using it for months and it bubbles up 90% of what i want to read. i thought it was just me, so I recommended it to non-tech friends and three of them all have come back and admitted they do most of their reading via prismatic. i was very skeptical initially, but have been presently surprised.

thanks so much! what can we do to make it even better?

Please get some more sharing integrations into the app. I want Buffer integration. Also I would love to have Pocket integration for reading something later.

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#52
post #47

Kudos for moving on this quickly, here is my feedback. When I clicked the OP link, I got a 'Sign up with Google Reader' link even though I have a logged-in Prismatic account already. After clicking through Google's authorize UI I received a 'Welcome to Prismatic' email so I think I might have created a dup account, but I can't tell. I would expect to be able to see my Twitter account and my Google Reader account in t…

+100

I already have prismatic via twitter, i'd love to add my google reader stuff.

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#53
Since the Prismatic team is reading, I'll post a couple requests/annoyances.

Context:

I'm on the obsessive side when it comes to news reading. I'm trying to accurately predict the future, which mostly works. I clear out my full Prismatic feed twice a day supplemented with first page HN twice daily and my google reader subscription covering ~300 low-volume blogs and 5 planets. Out of the 700-800 feed items I scan in a day, usually about 15 are interesting. Prismatic sources 2-3 of these that I don't get in other sources and usually has 10-11 of the 15 covered. I consider this to be excellent performance for a single source and recommend it to pretty much everybody.

Issues:

* I get a lot of (exact) duplicate articles. It seems like my feed tries to pull ~350 articles. If I cover them all, then refresh, I'll frequently but not always get ~200 unread articles, 90% of which I've just skimmed. I've also had this happen a couple hours later with the same 90% previously read behavior. On a more infrequent basis, I get the same article repeated for months. As an example, I've been getting 'Journey through the MVC Jungle' once every two weeks or so since it was published last summer.

* Topic clustering for medium volume topics. I know you're doing this for higher volume topics (though I'd prefer slightly more pruning) but I get a lot of repeat articles for lower volume topics. My annoyance at the moment is the rash of "no Firefox on iOS" articles. It's a stupid story (no actual change in Moz policy) but I've had like 40 articles on the topic all from different sources over the last 3 days or so. Don't know if there's a great solution but I'd like to be able to blacklist `Firefox AND iOS` for the next two weeks.

* Integration of low volume sources. Personal blogs by clever people are the absolute best source material and I do not want to miss any articles in these feeds. Looks like you're on top of this.

* Topic bucketing. I find it easier to partition the news by topic and then do my skim. For example, I want to do all my Clojure articles in one pass, then Mozilla articles in a second pass, then Web Design articles in a pass, etc. This seems to be an unusual pattern but it helps me filter out duplicates faster which is important due to volume. I do it on Google Reader by grouping feeds into folders and 'gu[foldername]'.

* Can't read on the subway (Android). I emailed back and forth with Jacob last October and said that I'd write an offline capable mobile version of the site but I still haven't gotten around to it. Happily, my framework is coming together and with the closing of Reader I actually have a deadline to finish this.

Regards.

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#54
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on all counts. On the upside, we're smarter than an RSS reader for high-volume feeds currently, and sort things based on how much we think you'll like them (based on topics, social information, and more) rather than just by time. Support for the 100%-of-feed use case is in the works, stay tuned.

Hopefully that feature can be disabled ?!

If it can I could never find it. I tried the service out twice and both times found it to try and show me a lot of stuff I didn't want to see and never improved on that front.

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#55
post #41
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, we're on your side :) We ask to read your contacts to help autocomplete email addresses for email shares and help you find friends on Prismatic (if you choose to do so). Last time I checked, Google didn't have a read-only contacts permission level, or we'd be using it.

Okay that makes sense, but isn't it possible to make this optional? It's not that I don't trust you in particular, but there have been a little too many leaks for me to trust anyone with my full contact list. They don't need to get spammed some day because I signed up for an alternative RSS reader and they happened to get hacked or whatever. I don't share things by e-mail anyway; if I wanna tell anyone about somethin…

Fine-grained oauth is clearly better and something we plan to do eventually, but we're a very small team and we've been prioritizing building features and improving the design and relevance for the time being.

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#56

I used to be a huge fan of Prismatic until it mysteriously decided about a month ago that all I want to hear about on main feed is Apple, Gadgets and Social Media. My other 63 interests (including Physics/Web dev/Genomics/Machine Learning/etc...) are nowhere to be seen and I find myself having to navigate through some of them manually to see more awesome stories that somehow don't make it to my main feed. This is the…

Sorry to hear about that. Want to email feedback@getprismatic.com and we'll look into it and try to get it fixed ASAP

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#57

I used to be a huge fan of Prismatic until it mysteriously decided about a month ago that all I want to hear about on main feed is Apple, Gadgets and Social Media. My other 63 interests (including Physics/Web dev/Genomics/Machine Learning/etc...) are nowhere to be seen and I find myself having to navigate through some of them manually to see more awesome stories that somehow don't make it to my main feed. This is the…

My biggest problem with Prismatic is the repeated stories. I mean - come on, you can always find duplicate articles where the titles are close to 100% same.

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#58
post #38

Why it needs an access to "manage my contacts"? Compared to early crazy years of Facebook apps, there has recently been a pleasant trend of apps asking just a minimum needed access rights and gradually asking for more if it needs. Now that all major platforms (Facebook, Google, Twitter, iOS) offer a pretty good way to display access rights - I think Facebook's way of showing them is the most clear of the pack - acces…

We ask to read your contacts to autocomplete email addresses for email shares and help you find friends on Prismatic (if you choose to do so). Last time I checked, Google didn't have a read-only contacts permission level, or we'd be using it.

Ok, thanks for the explanation.

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#59
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on all counts. On the upside, we're smarter than an RSS reader for high-volume feeds currently, and sort things based on how much we think you'll like them (based on topics, social information, and more) rather than just by time. Support for the 100%-of-feed use case is in the works, stay tuned.

Hopefully that feature can be disabled ?!

If by 'that feature' you mean the sort by perceived importance vs. time, I hope they make that possible to configure.

If you instead mean the suggestion of additional content into your feed - that's really the core point of Prismatic. I wouldn't expect to see that configurable / given an "off" switch ever. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's how they'll monetize the product - slipping in pay-for-placement content that's relevant to what you're reading.

Re: Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users

#60

i cant say enough positive things about prismatic. i have been using it for months and it bubbles up 90% of what i want to read. i thought it was just me, so I recommended it to non-tech friends and three of them all have come back and admitted they do most of their reading via prismatic. i was very skeptical initially, but have been presently surprised.

thanks so much! what can we do to make it even better?

improve search within the site - i want it to be easier to index and bring back articles i have read in the past. right now i manage this via sharing to twitter + adding to delicious.

if delicious has an API that lets you do it, add the ability to post directly to delicious

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