Internet hot spot of the week Kinja has been getting a lot of attention. My quick review: I like it. I’m not sure I prefer it to Bloglines, but it provides a different enough experience that I’m going to keep using for a few more days and see if it sticks.
Overview
What is Kinja? According to their about page:
Kinja is a weblog portal, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers.
Weblogs are much talked about, but still challenging to navigate for the average web user. Kinja is designed to bring weblog writers to a broader audience, by making it easier to explore topics, posts and writers.
That’s how the Kinja crew describes it, but it’s better just to see it in action. Here’s my public digest. I add all the weblogs I read, and then it puts them all together in order, with the most recent posts at the top.
Usability and Interface
Kinja’s best attributes are that it’s free and it’s easy to use. You don’t need to know what RSS is to use it — you just type in a site’s address and it does the work for you. The main page sports a clean design by 37signals (though it’s broken in IE 5.5, but I won’t dock many points for that). The user experience feels fresh and unintimidating, and you only have to look at a few unobtrusive text ads.
There are, though, a few elements that I don’ t like:
- The excerpts for each post are too short. I’ve found that it often doesn’t give me enough of an entry to decide if I’m interesting in reading the whole thing or not. True, it’s not supposed to be a hardcore aggregator, but I’d just like another sentence or two.
- The little thumbnails only work for a handful of sites. I can’t quite tell where it’s getting the images for them from, and I like them when present, but the blank boxes are distracting.
- It groups entries by weblog alphabetically instead of sorting them in true chronological order.
The Friends Test
Kinja has caught the eyes of the main players, but there’s a large, often overlooked segment of the weblogging world that has a lot of experience with exactly this sort of thing: LiveJournal. One of its main features is the ability for me to add another LJ user to my “Friends” list. Every entry made by one of my friends shows up on my Friends Page. It works so well that, for most LJ users, the Friends Page forms the center of their experience. It gives you an idea of your audience. When you write an entry it feels like you’re writing to people, not just publishing into the ethers of the web.
LiveJournal Friends Pages not only keep people apprised of their buddies’ posts, but also the conversations they’ve started. At the bottom of each post is a numbered link to any comments people have left. I go to my page, read new posts, and then scroll down to see if the comment counter has gone up. The usefulness of this would skyrocket if it also let me mark entries I’m interested in and then bumped those to the top of the page whenever a new comment was made. If Kinja could accomplish this on the scale of the world wide web, it would have be a truly amazing app. I know I’m becoming a bit of a broken record on comment management and notification, but new services like Kinja really have a chance at innovating weblogging.
Jason Kottke and Tom Coates have already brought up the exciting potential that comes with everyone’s Kinja digests being optionally public. LiveJournal has been doing this for years, and it works very well. Find a friend, click over to his page, and read what he reads. Find someone whose stuff you like, and add them with a few easy clicks. Kinja could make this easy by identifying posts made by registered users and providing a little icon pointing to their public digests (like Kottke’s done on his “Not Recommended At All” blogroll). The web is a big place, but features like this connect people. Comment bumping and interlinked digests could push Kinja from neat tool to community portal.
The Bottom Line
If you read more than 3 weblogs regularly, Kinja is for you. Consider also that Yahoo! News and The Washington Post come in RSS along with all major weblogging apps, and its usefulness applies to almost anyone who wants their own personal flow of information.