Douban Feeds Reader just get better

Written by Luyi Chen on January 28, 2007
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DoubanDouban, a review and recommendation community of books, movies and music, has been continuously improving its blog related feature. A few days ago, it added blog post voting, and we think this is going to make the whole service a lot more valuable.

Douban first rolled out the blog recommendation feature in Nov. 2006. It’s original version is very simple. It just use the same style as its book service and list the blog titles your collected statically. Although we believed it to be a right move, but it’s just not very useful at that time.

Then Douban added series of new features into this service. It first added OPML import, which was missing when it launched. (I don’t find export feature. And I believe Douban should provide this.) After that, it started to show latest posts from your blog collections. And it has realized that latest posts are the most important content of this service and has moved blog titles to the right side. What’s more, it adopted news review style, which just makes it become an excellent casual feeds reader.

For users with less than 50 feeds, Douban is just a good choice for your everyday feeds reading. In its latest improvements, it has changed original confusing name of the two panels. Now they are called Must Read and Pay Attention. If you are busy some day, you just have to go though your Must Read panel. Found some blog just becomes noisy? Move it to Pay Attention panel or finally delete it.

Since the slow down of Internet connection from Asia, I have been thinking of selecting a demotic online feeds reader for myself. But most of them just doesn’t work. They doesn’t provide me a quick way to go though my feeds and their feeds management feature just doesn’t work for more than 400 feeds. Douban surely is not for me either. But if you just have less than 50 feeds to check, Douban is the best service for your at this point.

What’s next? Douban has added vote button to each post. We can expect it to bring great social wisdom effect. According to Douban’s URL scheme, we guess you will be able to view hottest posts in digg style on http://www.douban.com/sites/ soon.

Now every blog entry has a landing page on douban. At this point, it just shows users who have voted this entry. But we can expect Douban will open comment soon. This will make Douban to become yet another promising blog community.

So are all these moves good for Douban’s core recommendation business? Definitely. With the introduction of features for blog, it gets more attention data of users. If I keep voting blog post about Microsoft .Net framework, I can expect Douban will finally recommend some Windows development books for me, even I have never collected any programming book in my user account.

Also book review community is not a site that most people should check everyday. With great feeds reader feature, it finally becomes a daily checking site for large amount of users.

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