Product Overview of NewsBlur
NewsBlur is a comprehensive and feature-rich personal news reader designed to help users efficiently manage and engage with their favorite news sources. Here’s a detailed look at what NewsBlur does and its key features:
What NewsBlur Does
NewsBlur is an RSS news reader that allows users to subscribe to and manage an unlimited number of RSS feeds. It is designed to bring people together to discuss and share news, making it a social as well as a personal news reading platform. With support for iOS, Android, and web apps, NewsBlur ensures users can access their news wherever they are.
Key Features
Feed Management
- Users can subscribe to an unlimited number of RSS feeds, with the option to update these sites up to 10 times more frequently with a Premium subscription.
- Feeds can be organized into collapsible folders, and users can read stories by oldest or newest first, or filter by unread or all stories.
Customization and Filtering
- One of NewsBlur’s standout features is its sophisticated AI filtering. Users can train the system to highlight or hide stories based on specific criteria, such as preferred authors or topics. This helps in surfacing the most relevant content from subscribed sites.
Story Management
- The Premium Archive subscription allows every story from every site to be archived and kept searchable forever. Users can also mark stories as unread indefinitely and choose when stories are automatically marked as read.
- Stories can be saved with searchable tags, and users can export trained stories from folders as custom RSS feeds.
Reading Experience
- NewsBlur offers various viewing options, including a new Magazine view that features larger images, longer story content previews, and improved text legibility. This view is customizable, allowing users to adjust font sizes, image preview positions, and story content preview lengths.
- The Grid view also includes improvements to story content previews, preserving new lines for better readability.
Social and Sharing Features
- Users can share their favorite stories on social networks or within the NewsBlur community. The “blurblog” feature allows users to create a public blog of shared stories, including comments, which can be followed by others even if they are not NewsBlur users.
Offline Support and Other Utilities
- NewsBlur provides offline support for stories and images, ensuring users can read their news even without an internet connection. The app also includes gestures and long presses for feeds and stories, as well as customizable offline sync settings.
- Users can send stories to various services like Facebook, Twitter, Instapaper, Pocket, and Evernote.
Technical and Backend Features
- NewsBlur’s API allows users to retrieve their feeds, feed counts, feed icons, feed statistics, and individual feed stories. It also supports optional parameters for searching feeds, showing hidden stories, and more.
Premium Subscription
- The NewsBlur Premium subscription offers additional features such as full text extraction that is sticky per-feed, privacy options for shared stories, and custom RSS feeds for folders and saved stories. The Premium Archive subscription, in particular, provides extensive archiving and search capabilities for all subscribed feeds.
In summary, NewsBlur is a powerful and user-friendly news reader that combines robust feed management, advanced filtering, a customizable reading experience, and social sharing features, making it an ideal tool for anyone looking to stay informed and engaged with their favorite news sources.