Gritwire
December 14th, 2005
I know that I said that I wasn’t going to post to LS this week, but I promised the Gritwire guys a plug and a review of their aggregator. This resource couldn’t have come at a better time for me as I’ve been in aggregator test mode (I have other reviews to post about Rojo and Newsgator online, but this is Gritwire time).
Gritwire is a flash-based RSS reader (you’ll need the latest version of Flash [8] to run it), which I’ve been having fun playing with. It has the typical “Outlook” panels going on with the normal stuff you’ll see in any aggregator on the market (folders, etc). What they do have that I’ve only seen in one other aggregator is a social networking aspect. I can add contacts and then send over recommended feeds to those on my list. Slick.
Gritwire also has a media player built in so that I can listen to podcasts that I subscribe to (which, up to this point, was non, but I may get started on this. There is also a neat little wiki application that they built it while I was talking to one of their developers before a session. Slick and slick!
Gritwire is not without issues. It’s very buggy in Firefox, has problems with OPML imports (it couldn’t handle my 500 feeds), and has some image display issues. A few among the many that I found on the first go round. I have a wiki set up with the developers where I report bugs.
Where do I see Gritwire in the future? I think that they should focus more on the social network aspect of the service. SN’s are so important now and I don’t see this importance dwindling anytime soon. I’ll continue to play with Gritwire and mention any enhancements that come out. You can follow along on your own by subscribing to their development blog.