March 21, 2011

Cliqly in Alpha: Visual Interface, Filters for Top Tech News

Curated news sites are so prevalent, it seems practically everybody has one. With simple tools like paper.li and others, you can even have them automatically generated from the social connections you have on Twitter and other networks. But there's still room for ingenious alternatives that play with highly visual layouts, filters, search and personalization. It looks like we're close to having a new one on our hands with the imminent launch of Cliq.ly, currently ruminating at the longer domain of http://gocliqly.com/, which rolls out top tech news in a tiled format, searchable by keyword.

While that in itself is interesting for fast browsing and article discovery, the service teases with a not yet active menubar for "Popular Scenes", "Views" and "Account", which theoretically lets you select your own keywords, sources or other tweaks that would let this potentially become your start page, providing an alternative to the more traditional RSS reader.

Cliqly Filtered With Google as a Keyword

If you visit the incubating http://gocliqly.com/ now, you'll see graphics from top news sources showing updates on Web services, browsers, and gadgets. A small textbox lets you filter by keyword, be it from the article's title, content or tags. I tried searches for many top tech terms, from "apple" to "google", "Android", "t-mobile" and blogs like Engadget and TechCrunch, all of which returned multiple results, clickable to the main original link.

Cliqly on "Tech"

One assumes that as Cliq.ly gets built, one get the opportunity to tweak views to be more graphical or less so, depending on one's preferences. Given the option for "Popular Scenes", it's possible you could create a personal scene with customized feeds and views and save it for others to view. But it's early days. In fact, DomainTools suggests Craig Condon, one of two behind the project, just snagged the URL yesterday. He mentions a designer, Tim, as a partner on the site, but he is providing the majority of the code.

Cliqly Showing Engadget Stories

What we're seeing from Cliqly on day one is a sneak peek tease of what's to come, no doubt, so bookmark this one, and watch the work develop.