Digg's Google Reader clone launching in beta on June 26

Shawn Knight

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Digg has been working at warp-speed over the past 90 days on a Google Reader replacement following the announcement that Google was shutting down their RSS reader this summer. To that end, the five-person Digg team has announced that a beta version of Digg Reader will be available to all users by June 26 – narrowly arriving before the July 1 shut down date for Google Reader.

The social news website said in a blog post on the subject that they would be doing the launch in phases as a full rollout at scale is hard to pull off. As for the actual product, Digg is first focusing on the power user” the person who depends on the availability, stability and speed of Reader every day.

digg google reader beta rss

digg google reader beta rss

Feedback from such users encouraged Digg to make it fast, keep it simple and allow users to import feeds and folders from Google Reader. And that’s exactly what Digg said they focused on with this beta release in addition to other basics like support for subscribing, sharing, saving and organizing.

Over the next 60 days, the company said they plan to focus on an Android app, improving speed, integrating it with third party services, offering better tools to sort, filter and rank reading lists and feeds and collecting / responding to user feedback. They will also start working on search and notifications although those two features sound like they could still be a little ways off.

Digg hinted at a paid model last month and that still seems to be the current course. There will be a free version, however, that’ll carry all of the features introduced next week as well as others to come, we’re told.

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