Fav.or.it, a new RSS reader with integrated commenting and community features, has launched its public beta. One of the more notable features of Fav.or.it is the ability for users to make comments on blog posts from within the reader, which will also appear on the actual blog they came from. What this means is that if you’re reading Mashable in Fav.or.it and want to leave a comment, you can do so from within the reader, and that comment can be seen both by the Fav.or.it community and on Mashable.com.
Staying on the commenting theme, the company has also announced that Disqus, the distributed commenting system, will be using the fav.or.it API. This means that blog owners who use Disqus for their comments will also have the benefit of fav.or.it users being able to remotely leave comments on their posts.
Returning to within the fav.or.it site, the feed reader itself is quite impressive and more feature rich than my current “favorite” Google Reader. There are more community features such as voting a story up or down, sharing it, or adding tags, which are another big feature of fav.or.it. Top voted stories show up on the fav.or.it homepage.
The company has seeded their reader with hundreds of feeds and categorized them. Within each category, you can see related tags. For example, within Technology, you can click tags to see stories about Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. Also, when you’re looking at a specific feed, such as Mashable, you can drill down to see all stories we’ve published about “social networking” or “widgets.”
Taking it a step further, fav.or.it has a feature called “slices,” which founder Nick Halstead describes as “a cross section of the blogosphere - it can be defined as tags/categories/date/user(s)/topic(s)/feed and any combination of. If you go to profile/slices you will see our ‘advanced editor’ to make very complex slices (this is great for brand owners, to watch a particular topic/brand).”
Overall, I like what I see so far with fav.or.it. If you’re just starting out in the blogosphere, I’d absolutely recommend it as your feed reader for the commenting feature alone – it’s simply much more efficient than clicking thru to the actual blog to leave your comment – which will make it easier for you to start interacting with blogs and their communities. If you’re already using a feed reader, switching is a bit more complicated. The so-called “lock-in” is strong for some users (like Scoble) – especially if you’re a big user of things like Google Reader’s Shared Items. On the other hand, if you don’t have the following of Scoble, is restarting your shared list such a big deal? I’m not sure.
Thus, I think if you’re not already “famous,” fav.or.it is worth considering. In addition to being a strong feed reader, the service makes it easier to leave comments, which will make it easier for you to gain mindshare, which, is ultimately the goal for many people that participate in the blogosphere. Beyond that, fav.or.it also plans to launch their own blogging platform in coming months, so you can both do your feed reading and blog reading under one roof.
That said, there isn’t much to stop Google Reader from adding similar features, and developers are already building communities on top of Google Reader shared items data, such as ReadBurner and RSSMeme. But, with its current feature roadmap, fav.or.it appears to be making a play to take RSS mainstream, which, I’d argue is still a wide open opportunity.
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