Guzzle Revamps Personal Aggregator, Adds iPhone App

The world of news personalization powered by RSS has been very interesting over the last year or so, with innovation coming from companies such as Lazyfeed, my6sense, Feedly and tweaks to Google Reader, including its "Magic" feature. One personalized aggregator, called Guzzle (which I first covered in July of 2009) has gotten less visibility, but the company is hoping to change that with two major updates - including the refresh of its news aggregator, and the introduction of an iPhone app - to let you get news on topics you have selected while on the go.

Guzzle Highlights News By Topic You Select, Displayed As You Wish

How you get news in today's world of streams varies by site. RSS readers primarily ask you to bring your own feeds. Social networks let you follow people. Some sites, like Regator, show you news from select sources by topic. Lazyfeed and Guzzle show you updates by topics you have picked, and the pages are regularly updated. But Lazyfeed doesn't yet have a mobile application, and Guzzle does. True to form, it quickly captured top stories on the topics I'm most interested in, and lets me view them one by one in the browser.

Guzzle's back-end has been completely rewritten from its 2009 launch, and is now powered by PubSubHubbub, thanks to support from Superfeedr. Every time a monitored feed publishes a new article, it is parsed by topic and assigned to the categories you may be viewing. This is similar to the work the late Socialmedian pioneered in 2008, but Guzzle has a portal-like interface to see the updates, reminiscent of My Alltop.


Guzzle's iPhone App Sorts By Topic
Interesting features of the new Guzzle? The product keeps track of every article published, and you can search its archives. You can also display news in an expanded mode, like Feedly, with large images (on the desktop version anyway).


Viewing Stories On Guzzle's iPhone App
While the desktop version of Guzzle is free, the iPhone application is $1.99. (get it here) If you don't mind parting with two bucks, Guzzle on the iPhone is a quick way to get caught up on the topics you're monitoring while mobile - and is an alternative to the personal prioritization of my6sense or the editorial sifting performed by Regator.

Guzzle also is transparent in terms of the sources that power its database. You can see them all here or can suggest new ones that haven't made the list.

Disclosure: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

Guzzle It: The RSS-Powered Personalized Site With A Unique Name

The Web has moved away from one built around stale Web sites that treat you like any other visitor. Now, practically every leading site features personalization, giving you customized news sources, social aspects, and increasingly, the option to choose specific topics to keep you updated on. Just two weeks ago we introduced you to Lazyfeed, a cool Web project based on real-time topic discovery, and tonight, we've been looking at another customizable site that is focused on topics you select, called Guzzle It, complete with the .it extension, awkward name and logo.

Jolie O'Dell, who wrote about the service for ReadWriteWeb a week ago, called it "one of the cleanest, coolest, most intuitive, most customizable news dashboards we've seen". And yeah, it's cool. It has a solid user interface, and as I liked with Lazyfeed, it doesn't ask you to come packing OPML. It just asks for topics you like and builds out your page.


Getting Set Up On Guzzle It
To start "guzzling", just enter topics you want to follow, arrange them on a grid for how you would like them displayed, and say you're done. Guzzle It will look through its preselected news sources and spit out the answers, arranged as you want, and then give you the option to display it in article (text) mode, or with images. Clicking on any image or story brings you to the original source.


Setting Up Headlines for Google, Apple and Twitter
Like with most strong news sources, Guzzle It highlights the most-recent article chronologically, with older items fading to the bottom part of the feed. But instead of following up on specific news sources and blogs, I could choose to follow cool topics I like, from "Silicon Valley" and "Google" to "Venture Capital" or even "Oakland A's". If I had to complain, I'd say Guzzle didn't gulp down enough sources for me, relying mainly on the most prominent sources for news.

It's clear the world is getting more customizable. And topics are aiming to fight social as the big differentiator. Guzzle It is a cute easily laid out alternative, but I'll probably stick with Lazyfeed, thanks to its much broader array of sources, and its real-time capability. If you want to start guzzling, go to http://www.guzzle.it.