With Google Reader officially closing up shop on July 1st, users are scrambling to look for alternatives. As Techcrunch recently highlighted, nothing will entirely replace users’ beloved Google Reader, however there are alternatives out there. That being said, none of these alternatives have managed to fully replicate the most positive aspects of the Google Reader experience. Even the current leaders Feedly, who recently pulled its search functionality, and Digg, which is still a bit of a work in progress given its rapid development and launch in the wake of the Google Reader shut-down announcement, haven’t yet nailed the experience. Enter NOOWIT, a Greece-based startup with a beautifully designed, functionally intuitive content discovery and self-publishing platform that’s looking to change the game in this space.
NOOWIT’s key positioning is less functional reader and more of a ‘intelligent reader’ that transforms content feeds from any source into an intuitive, smart digital magazine. So instead of offering a simple way to read docs on various devices, curation and, more precisely, curation based on the type of content the reader interacts with in real-time, is the key value that they are looking to deliver. In order to achieve this, they use new ‘adaptive’ information filtering technology, based on artifical intelligence. As a result of analyzing of how you interact with content elsewhere online, NOOWIT can do practical things like increase the size of the article in your personalized magazine when you ‘like’ that article or adapt the magazine as a whole as your remove (or ‘cut’) certain content, evolving as your move from one interest to another.
Perhaps the most interesting feature for Google Reader users specifically is their recent launch of an integration reader which allows these users to seamlessly import their current feeds and categories into ‘Discover’. In addition, bloggers and other registered users will soon be able to author content on the platform and even make some cash through NOOWIT’s reward program.
At the moment, only their HTML5, web app version is available. However, this will change soon as the launch of their iOS app is also on the horizon. NOOWIT is still in private beta until July 1 when they’ll be launching more broadly. The NOOWIT team have offered Rude Baguette readers a limited number of pre-beta trials before the big launch next week, so if you’d like to give NOOWIT a whirl, hurry and check it out HERE.
