What is Activorous?
Activorous is an application for keeping up with content online. It shares some features with RSS aggregators such as Google Reader, but is also much more than that. Activorous specifically aims to address the information overload caused by the volume and fragmentation of social media in our lives. This is achieved through the pursuit of three central principles:
- Put everything you want to read in one place
- Always know what you should look at next, and show you that
- Give you seamless access to your reading list wherever you are
Not just RSS feeds, but content from any web page or other online source, including social networking sites you have to log in to; even E-mail lists.
By freeing you from worrying about what to read next, using intelligent prioritization and filtering technology, Activorous allows you to spend less time flitting from site to site, and more time reading the most important and interesting updates. It's like Ritalin for your web browser.
This means working with a wide variety of mobile devices, and keeping track of what you've already read as you move from one device to another. It also means being cognizant of the capabilities of your reading device, and the environment you're in, when choosing what to display.
And Look Good Doing It
One problem with RSS is that it has a tendency to reformat everything to look like a missing cat poster. Don't believe me? Here's a little widget so you can do a side-by-side comparison:
Preserving the original formatting for content not only looks better, it lets you skim faster; it's easy to recognize at a glance where an item came from, and many of the better site designs incorporate handy visual references that cue you on the type or topic of articles.
Of course, if you prefer more simply formatted content, or don't like a site's layout, you can use normal RSS feeds as well. Either way, you can customize what's displayed:
Fast Preview
Do you spend a lot of time opening and closing tabs? Activorous lets you quickly see more details about an item without navigating away from the reader. For most image thumbnails, you can just hover over to see the full sized version. This works even in many cases where the thumbnail didn't link directly to the larger image.
For other content, you can click any link to open a preview pane:
Of course, you can easily get out of the preview pane, too; just click the 'link' button at the top and Activorous will close the preview and open the site in a new browser tab/window. The preview pane can also be disabled on a feed-by-feed basis for sites that don't work well in a frame.
Both of these features use intelligent preloading to make things come up more quickly than they would during regular browsing.
Mobile Support
Activorous also features a lightweight version of the reader application, which will work on virtually any device with a browser supporting basic Javascript. The mobile reader stays in sync with Activorous, and even allows you to tag items for later desktop viewing. It features the same seamless preloading-infinite-scroller interface as the normal reader; no clicking 'more' or waiting for items to load. Here's a screenshot of Activorous running on my Android G1:
Notice how Activorous stays out of your way while you're reading, saving all the valuable screen real estate for content.
So you can read news sites on your smartphone, big deal, right? How about reading Twitter and Facebook on your Amazon Kindle:
Navigating normal web pages on the Kindle is a nightmare of twiddling with the rocker and waiting for interminable page loads. With the Activorous mobile reader, you just click the Next-page button and the next page loads instantly (well, as fast as anything does on a Kindle); more items are preloaded in the background while you're reading.
And Much More
- Trainable prioritization engine; Activorous learns what you like
- One-click feed filtering/grouping; create and save views on the fly
- Tagged item queues with independent read-status tracking (think: "read later", "show mom")
- NSFW filter that remembers which computers are work computers
- WYSIWYG configuration wizard for new feeds
- Powerful, programmable post-processing engine for customizing feed display
- More features being added every day!
Like what you see? Sign Up for the Beta Now