Great article, and agreed on most everything you said. Regarding Prismatic itself, some constructive feedback (feel free to ignore).
My immediate first impression was that this was another app that would waste my time. I want less of those, not more. The absolute best news feed app I've used is Flipboard for the iPad, and even then I don't use it too much as I feel too much like I'm wasting time with it (like HN!).
Secondarily, the homepage doesn't grab you enough. The text in the graphics is too blurry and the pictures are generic. The homepage below the icons doesn't have the production values to explain why it's cool.
I'm not trying to be negative here. Some of the points in your article really hit home (email summarization would be awesome and paradigm shifting). So I wonder if you might focus more on making something that will save people time and solve a pain point vs. "another web-based time-wasting thing" (that may not be fair, but that was a first impression).
For example, can you scrape an inbox and list of Facebook/Github/Tumblr/RSS/Twitter feeds to get a single high-sensitivity greatest hits from all monitored news feeds? This way you can check a single page in five minutes on your phone and feel reasonably content that you saw the top headlines for that week. Kind of like news.ycombinator.com/best.
> For example, can you scrape an inbox and list of Facebook/Github/Tumblr/RSS/Twitter feeds to get a single high-sensitivity greatest hits from all monitored news feeds
You've missed the point already. The web is vast, on the whole filled with 99.99% crap. But .01% of something large is still very big. You cannot list the interesting things a priori with a few feeds. Prismatic is about learning about what you actually like to read and giving it to you. It's got the smooth/sleak usability of Google reader (read title, keep smashing J when something isn't worth reading, essentially letting you skim/reject more than 10 uninteresting articles/minute), but without the low recall "enumerate every site I think I am interested in" subscription model.
Ok, I might well be missing the point. But enough people upvoted that I think this is a common perception: "Oh, not another time-waster". So, maybe make the homepage address this issue head on with a good video that shows why this is compelling, awesome, and productivity-increasing.
I do think it's mostly a time filler like say, hackernews or a good subreddit. Maybe you'll find some article that will increase your productivity, but that's definitely not the focus. It's just about giving you a stream of articles that you'll probably enjoy reading.
j/k: Jump to next/previous article
up/down: Scroll to next/previous article with animation
space: Scroll to next article
s: open share box for active article
o: open active article in new tab
b: bookmark active article in new tab
f: Go to search field and find new interests.
r: to recommend active story
gh: go to home feed
gd: go to your feed of saved stories
gr: go to your feed of recommended stories
gg: go to top news 'global' feed
Another comment on Prismatic (it took me a few days to get around trying it): Hacker News and Reddit are good for finding interesting new information, and they combine it with a pretty good discussion that usually attracts experts. That combination is really fantastic, and even if Prismatic improves the information-finding, can it also link me to an expert discussion of the article?
My immediate first impression was that this was another app that would waste my time. I want less of those, not more. The absolute best news feed app I've used is Flipboard for the iPad, and even then I don't use it too much as I feel too much like I'm wasting time with it (like HN!).
Secondarily, the homepage doesn't grab you enough. The text in the graphics is too blurry and the pictures are generic. The homepage below the icons doesn't have the production values to explain why it's cool.
I'm not trying to be negative here. Some of the points in your article really hit home (email summarization would be awesome and paradigm shifting). So I wonder if you might focus more on making something that will save people time and solve a pain point vs. "another web-based time-wasting thing" (that may not be fair, but that was a first impression).
For example, can you scrape an inbox and list of Facebook/Github/Tumblr/RSS/Twitter feeds to get a single high-sensitivity greatest hits from all monitored news feeds? This way you can check a single page in five minutes on your phone and feel reasonably content that you saw the top headlines for that week. Kind of like news.ycombinator.com/best.
Just some thoughts, FWIW.