Digg’s RSS news reader will launch in beta next week, and everyone will have access by June 26, the company announced in a blog post Monday. It will provide a closer look at company’s effort to capitalize on the demise of Google Reader.
We’ve written extensively about why Digg is launching an RSS reader and how the company’s knowledge about news junkies and early tech adopters will help inform its approach. Betaworks, the NYC-based incubator and investor, purchased Digg last summer and has been working on revamping it since then to be the ultimate social news source.
The RSS reader will launch in beta next week on both desktop and mobile, and the team at Digg said they would be working on adding an Android app and integration with other news reader services very soon.
Here’s how the company described it in the blog post Monday:
“And so next week we will begin rolling out Digg Reader, version 1. We’re doing the launch in phases because, as you might have guessed, RSS aggregation is a hard thing to do at scale, and we want to make sure the experience is as fast and reliable as possible. Everyone will have access by June 26th. With all this in mind, we thought now would be a good moment to come up for air and share a little bit about the product you’ll see next week, and what else we’ll be adding over the next few months.
Given the compressed time frame for this sprint, we decided early on that we needed to focus on one type of user. We asked ourselves who had most to lose from the shutdown of Google Reader, and the answer was fairly obvious: the power user, the people who depend on the availability, stability, and speed of Reader every day. The good news is that these users are also the most eager to contribute to the development process. (Over 18,000 people signed up to provide feedback on the product.)”
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