Particls to take RSS mainstream

By Vivek | May 28th, 2007 at 10:38 am ET         

There is no denying fact that RSS is here to stay after having revolutionized how we gather and consume information from far greater number of sources than ever before. But the growth in the number of people who subscribe to RSS feeds is highly dependent on the quality of tools available at hand that can appeal more to common users than heavy users. Pure RSS feed readers are great, but most of the people want to stay from another Inbox like application that the 100s of news articles they haven’t read in the past few days. Besides that, all the articles and information posted on any one blog cannot always be 100% relevant to everyone.

Particls, the Australia based startup behind APML, is opening up to public users today to solve just this problem set. Particls is trying to change the game by offering a filtered news reader or widget that learns what you care about and alerts you to important news and information while you work. And the alerts are displayed via desktop alerts for important changes, a mechanism that is quite different from what most of the existing population is used to. And the difference does not stop here. You feed in your interests(keywords) into Particls and it can work out how important the new information is and display an alert that is proportional to its importance to you. So, a general information might be displayed on a news ticker, important stuff might appear on a popup alert and urgent information might be SMS’d to your phone. I think this is really smart way of getting things to your attention instead of manually trying to extract relevant information from couple of thousand feeds and thousands of posts every day(not to mention about the duplicate articles).

Besides the alerts and attention data side of things, Particls host of other features that can appeal to number of users. Case in point are the Right-click actions that enable users to send items to social services like Digg, Reddit, Sphere, Del.icio.us and others. The right click menu also allows users to rate content up and down so they can tweak the system. Then you have the Tear-offs that let users tear off popup alerts and ticker items and place them on the desktop. In other words you can say something like instant post-it-note so they can come back later to read the item. Another smart feature - Just as in Google Talk client that does not show new email alerts when you are away from your machine,  Particls has the Auto-Away functionality that will automatically detect when you’re away from your computer and will hold off your alerts until you come back.

Couple of smart of features to take care of your interests - Interest Searches, where Particls can automatically set up searches for your interests and get personally relevant data for you from across the Internet, and Auto-detected Interests, where Particls can scan your browsing history and other Attention Data and learn what your interests are. And to keep up with all the new sites your discover and start visiting regularly, Particls has the Auto-subscriber automatically subscribes to those sites for you.

After all said and done, Particls does not want to be a tool just for media and blog feeds. Particls platform comes enabled with ability for developers to create Adapters. Developers can write input and output adapters to grab content from all sorts of sources and display it in innovative ways.

Do you think the post got too long? Don’t blame me for that, instead thank Particls team for delivering a comprehensive product at it’s launch. For now, grab Particls by clicking on the image below:

Links:
Particls