Some weeks ago I set out to use Kinja as my new weblog aggregator.
At first I was a bit sceptic, because most comments about Kinja pinpointed the target group to people who are new to weblogs resp. unable to install/use old-style aggregators.
Previously to Kinja I used rss2email by Aaron Swartz, which is a fine piece of work and combined with a customizable mail client it allows quasi "infinitely personalized aggregation". So much for the buzzwords.
Kinja's user interface cannot be customized in any way, which isn't a real problem, because the UI looks really slick and loads fast. Instead of just displaying the content of the RSS feeds of the digested sites, they select the first two or three sentences of each entry and show them. This avoids sentences that stop right in the middle and it also gets rid of phrases like "Read more ...".
All in all I was impressed by how well Kinja works for me, though I don't consider myself to be part of their primary target group and there are only two minor annoyances:
- Can we please get back the text ads? I don't have anything against advertisements, but the flashy ads suck.
- There does not seem to be a way to remove the "Did you know?" sections that appear in the digest from time to time.
Finally I'm wondering how they harvest the thumbnail that is displayed next to most entries. They definitively not just copy the infamous favicon.ico file. Anyone knows?