I’m sure most people who use RSS have a hard time keeping up with their daily updates. And if they do it is still hard to cut through the clutter and find what really interests you.
Spectives is a new Dutch start-up (launched today) that aims to offer a new way to look at RSS feeds. They provide a visual RSS reader that displays only images and titles. As we all know a picture is a lot easier to analyze and browse than a few sentences so this might actually be a convenient way to quickly check your feeds.
As a test I set-up a TheNextWeb ‘collection’ at Spectives with our own RSS Feed as an example.
When I imported the RSS feed to our Friendfeed forum it refused with a warning “Bummer, could not find images in this feed”. I understand that some feeds don’t show images but I would prefer to be able to import them anyway. The least they could do is show a few words instead of an image if there is no image.
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The idea of browsing more visually is attractive and the service has a clean look and easy user interface. I don’t see it becoming a serious competitor to Google Reader or any of the other feature loaded RSS readers out there but it might appeal to the less techy crowd that just wants to get a quick entertainment fix. To help people put together a personal channel, or ‘collection’, Spectives offers a whole range of pre-selected feeds. I can see a lot of people putting together a few collection quickly and using the service not as an alternative to a ‘normal’ reader but as a nice extra.
Spectives.com in one minute from Spectives on Vimeo.
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