Readr blog

Hi everyone,

We’ve been hard at work on Readr, and we just wanted to give you a heads-up in case you haven’t seen some of the cool stuff we’ve been adding lately:

• Dashboard: the main Readr interface is now through your Dashboard, and we’ve tried to simplify things so that it’s easier both to post new stuff and to manage your profile.
• Thumbs Up: Now you can give a post from a friend a quick “thumbs up” to say that you liked what they posted.  Show a little love without leaving a comment.
• Themes: choose from a bunch of really cool backgrounds and color combinations for your profile.
• Privacy settings: Now you can choose whether you’d like an account to be visible to the public, or only to your friends… this was a much-requested feature, so enjoy!
• And, of course, more supported sites, like Amazon Wish Lists (great for sharing your holiday gift list with your friends!)

We’ve been busy trying to make Readr better for everyone. Remember, Readr gets much much more fun the more friends you invite, so we’d humbly suggest inviting more people!

In case you haven’t checked your Readr lately, here are some of the things that are new or have changed lately:

• Customization! Choose your own colors or a new background image.  Make your Readr page totally your own!
• Widgets! We now offer 3 kinds of widgets for your blog, MySpace, or other page - a fancy Flash widget, a “latest status” widget that shows your latest update to Twitter or Facebook Status (works on *any* site!), and a Javascript widget.  The Flash and status widgets even match your custom colors!
• Post bulletins and share links with your friends: now you don’t need any external accounts for simple sharing of bulletins and links with your Readr friends.  It’s super easy - just click on the big buttons on your Readr home page.
• More “officially” supported sites: we now make it easy to add your StumbleUpon, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Reader Shared Items to your profile.  Even though Readr can work with just about any Web service that outputs RSS or Atom, we’re going to continue offering “official” support for more services.. expect more updates soon!
• Improved RSS feeds  - in response to your feedback, we’ve made our RSS feeds a bit more rich and fun to use!

We’re still working hard to improve our interface and add new features, and we always appreciate your feedback.  Thanks for using Readr, and be sure to invite your friends!

We’ve been hard at work improving Readr. Some highlights from the past few weeks:

• New layout for your own page and your profile page. We think it’s both snazzier and easier to read. Let us know what you think.
• Post to Twitter and Delicious straight from Readr — just click on one of the links from the right side of the page.
• Better link handling - for example, if you post a YouTube video to del.icio.us, we’ll display the YouTube video embedded directly in your feed. We’ll be rolling out more changes in this department soon.
• Better e-mail digest that looks more like our site does
• Lots of small improvements to comments, emails, and other stuff.

We’ve got a lot of new stuff coming out this week, so expect more soon. Let us know what you think about the recent changes, and thanks for using Readr!

– The Readr Team

Well, week 3 here at Readr has come to a close, and this week we had our first mention in the tech blogosphere, from Mashable. Thanks to the Mashable crew for the article. We’d like to welcome all of our new users that signed up this week.

One thing that Mashable didn’t mention, and that perhaps we didn’t do a good job of communicating, is that Readr is much more than a “profile aggregator.” Not only do we pull together your stuff from around the Web, we also pull in your friends’ updates into an easy-to-read list. We also can email you “Readr Digests” of what your friends are up to, with their blogs, photos, and more.

Trust us — Readr is much better when you invite your friends.

We’ve also been busy coding new features, improving our infrastructure, and fixing bugs. Here are a couple of new things you might find cool:

• Notification settings, which allow you to choose which of your friends’ accounts you’d like to receive updates from. Love your friend Roger but can’t stand his blog? You won’t have to receive updates from it (and, just to be polite, Roger won’t know).
• Pagination on your Home Page: you might notice that there are links for multiple pages at the bottom of your Home Page. You can go back and see up to 7 days of your friends’ updates.
• Better RSS Feeds: for the RSS-savvy out there, there are now fully functional RSS feeds for individual profiles. RSS is also coming to your Home Page as well.

As always, please send us your feedback, and thanks for using Readr. We’ll keep working to make things better.

Hello, Readr users!

Thanks for using Readr.  We’ve been open to the public for a bit more than a week now, and we hope you’ve enjoyed using the site as much as we’ve enjoyed working on it.  Here are just a few of the things we’ve added or improved since our launch:

• Easily add more accounts, including Myspace, Facebook, and Digg
• Invite friends from your Hotmail, GMail, or Yahoo! address book
• Better e-mail digests
• Many, many bug fixes to make the site more stable

We’ve got plans for many more — and we’d love to hear your input on where you’d like to see Readr go in the future.  Leave your comments here (or on the site) and we’ll give you our full attention.

Once again, thanks for using Readr!

– The Readr team

Hi.

We kinda sorta launched Readr today.   We like it, and we hope you do too.  Send all comments, complaints, and correspondence to comments -AT- readr .dot. com — we’d be happy to hear from you.

Love,

the Readr team.

Expect lots of amazing updates in the very near future!