Thrilled to be launching NewsBlur's social features. NewsBlur has become something much bigger than what I ever thought possible when I wrote the first line of code in June 2009 in the New York City underground.

We're now two people and YC-backed. We have so many new big features coming down the pipeline. An iPad app, an updated iPhone app, an Android app, all first-class experiences.

This is the launch of Blurblogs. This is my blurblog: http://samuel.newsblur.com.

I was working on a (now-shuttered) startup in this space. Almost universally people's favorite feature was seeing the live website. I had also built in a reading queue into the application, the idea being that you could do inbox-zero with your feeds if you could process them extremely fast.

I talked to a bunch of largely non-technical RSS power users and discovered that the people who really use RSS readers are subscribed to 1500+ feeds and barely scratch the surface of reading everything in them.

It was really disheartening to discover my fundamental premise was wrong, and at the same time my now-cofounder contacted me with a great idea with a clearly underserved market so I abandoned the solo effort for that.

I think there's a ton of room for innovation in the media reader space, so I wish NewsBlur luck!

I've been watching NewsBlur for a while now, even exchanging a few emails with Sam. He's a first class guy and I'm excited to see what he can do with NewsBlur. Congrats on the launch!

This is barely related to the actual article, and only occurred to me because I was excited by the name "NewsBlur", but then discovered that it isn't necessarily news-related.

Are there any startups doing interesting stuff with news, journalism or any of the like? I've seen a lot of services that will aggregate the links your Twitter friends are posting and so on, but I'm more interested in the actual reporting itself.

Check out my version of a Blurblog, I styled it a little differently: http://roy.newsblur.com

On the roadmap, theming and letting people really make their Blurblog their own.

Full disclosure, I am 2 of 2 at NewsBlur!

So as a heavy Google Reader user (processing about 300 articles a day), can someone sum up the advantages to switching to NewsBlur? It's not entirely clear from this article or the NewsBlur site. Or perhaps its target audience is not me?

Congrats - does the funding affect plans to continue open-source development?

First off congrats to the Newsblur guys. I am a big fan. One thing that I would really like to see is some sort of sharing feature akin to Google Reader's old "shared items".

Google Reader is missing a serious mobile component, and I'm excited by what I see with NewsBlur. Congrats on the launch!

Are you going to fix the feed archival problem at some point? (we've spoken about it before :-) )

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