fav.or.it is a new type of RSS Reader currently in private beta, which aims to solve the long-standing issue of feed content being separated from commenting. The fav.or.it RSS Reader lets you read feed content and comment, all within the app. The comments can be two-way, meaning publishers can choose to aggregate fav.or.it comments into their blogs. As of now the site is not public, so we can’t check this out, but the company is asking for people to submit 10,000 blog feeds that will be the initial content that makes up the site.
Fav.or.it is a full-featured browser-based RSS Reader, similar to Google Reader. But the main highlight of the service will be integrated commenting, or “full cycle feed reading” as the company refers to it. This means users will be able to read feeds and comment on them within the fav.or.it app. This is a neat feature, however it also means that fav.or.it will need to build its own community in order to attract comments – much like any blog does.
One thing that will help ramp it up is the two-way process the company is promising – whereby they will provide “a range of technologies that allows fav.or.it to send replies back to the original blog host.” This could be the killer feature. Say you make a comment in fav.or.it on a Read/WriteWeb post. If I, as the publisher, have enabled fav.or.it comments to be sent to R/WW as comments – then that is win-win-win. Fav.or.it gets to tap into the R/WW community (and get new subscribers), and vice versa R/WW taps into the fav.or.it community (because let’s be honest, often people camp out in their RSS Reader all day and never visit blogs). The third ‘win’ is that readers can choose to leave comments either in fav.or.it or R/WW, giving them more choice.
The company plans to achieve the two-way process by one of two ways: the first is “you creating an account on fav.or.it and supplying us with account details (via XMLRPC)” and the second (and probably easiest) is “you install one of our widgets which seamlessly integrates with your blog to allow zero-configuration of post/comment aggregation and post back.” An announcement will be made on supported blog platforms in the next few weeks.
Incidentally, it would also be excellent if fav.or.it aggregated comments from the blogs – as well as allowing blogs to post fav.or.it comments. I’m not sure if this is part of their plan, but that would make the process 100% two-way.
An example of fav.or.it commenting
Other than integrated comments, fav.or.it seems like a fairly typical modern RSS Reader. It has the ‘infinite scroll’ feature of Google Reader, Slicing (switch what you want to read by category, rank or tag), ability to remember “your most used slices”, and remix feeds (every slice you create can be recreated as a brand new feed which can then be read by another feed reader). All of these features are slick and very much influenced by Google Reader, which is a good thing because Google Reader is probably the leading browser-based RSS Reader currently.
While there is no site to review just yet, the following video is a useful introduction to the concepts that fav.or.it is trying to achieve:
