Rivered launches as Google Reader alternative

A Google Reader alternative called Rivered, which is based on the idea of consuming feeds of news in a Twitter-like stream, was launched at the weekend.

Rivered – available at Rivered.io – has been created by a team at PXi Ventures, a technology incubator founded by Xenophin Lategan, who was News International's chief technology officer until four months ago, and before that worked at Google and Microsoft.

Lategan introduced Rivered in a presentation at Digital Media Europe, a three-day conference taking place in London. He also explained how Shoreditch-based PXi Ventures launched Vinepeek, a site which broadcasts newly created 'Vines', the six-second videos created on the app launched by Twitter in January.

The new RSS reader launched on Sunday (14 April), one month after Google announced it was axing Reader.

"We take the concept of Twitter, where you stream news to a user, and we stream your RSS feeds to you," Lategan told Journalism.co.uk.

The site has been designed with mobile in mind, with the expectation that many people will use it as a second screen to monitor news in the same way they would Twitter.

"The idea is you log in to Rivered and just like you would use Twitter, you don't try and catch up on all your feeds. You look at your feeds and they stream to you like a continuous 'river' of feeds," Lategan explained.

Rivered costs $2 a month (£1.35) or $20 a year to use. If you do not sign up for a subscription you simply see "a sample 'river' of some popular news websites", the site explains.

Users can add feeds and share via Twitter, Facebook, Buffer and email, and save to Pinboard or Pocket.

Rivered also allows you to import your Google Reader feeds. To do this sign up for an account, export your Google Reader feeds by following these instructions, and then in Rivered click on 'import OPML', choose the XML file you downloaded from Google Reader and hit 'upload'.

The new RSS reader launched in beta on Sunday and a notice on site warns that the OPML import feature is "experimental". We tested it and were able to import feeds from Google Reader without any problems.

For more information, click this: http://www.journalism.co.uk

Date: 20.04.2013, 2086 users viewed this page.