New 9taps Reader Rocks

Written by Luyi Chen on January 13, 2009
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This version of Douban’s 9taps reader is a revolution. It’s not about the content in four channels. It’s about how it can help you go through you subscription more smoothly. Douban’s own PR post is misleading by leaning too much towards media angle.

The reason douban dropped a consistent UI is that blog post is different from book review. The original version can hardly help you clean your unread. That’s why it couldn’t be called a reader before. This version learns a lot from Google Reader. If it can let me just go though the feeds by typing “j j j”, then it would be a serious competitor in RSS reader market.

One feature that I want but it hasn’t is “search”. This is different from the search box you can see on Douban’s homepage. That’s item title search. I want content search. For example, if I search for “九点”, it should show me related articles ranked according to recommendation, publish time and subscription number, etc.

It would be even better if Douban just spin off 9taps as an independent project. Certainly Douban’s existing users should be able to import data in one step. New users can just start from scratch.

3 Responses to “New 9taps Reader Rocks”

  1. Ray Zhao on January 13th, 2009 5:05 pm

    sorry, i couldn’t see the “revolution” part on for Douban 9taps, how is it substantially different from other rss reader?

    And what does “It’s about how it can help you go through you subscription more smoothly” mean?

    Could you kindly point out, thanks

  2. Luyi Chen on January 13th, 2009 7:35 pm

    I am not comparing with other RSS reader. I am comparing with old version. It’s a revolutionary upgrade.

    And comparing to the old version, it significantly simplified your work flow of going through feeds.

  3. John Biesnecker on January 22nd, 2009 7:35 am

    One strangely simple feature that it doesn’t seem to have (though maybe I’m just missing it) is being able to mark something as unread. I often half-finish an article and mark it unread so it’s still there when I come back, but 9点 doesn’t seem to allow this.

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