BlogRovr provides quite an interesting way to browse news. After choosing a combination of recently visited websites as well as those you regularly follow, and installing the BlogRovr Firefox extension, you will receive news items everywhere you go. Similarly to Sphere, BlogRovr fetches items related to whatever you’re currently reading, but instead of presenting them in a box you have no control of, BlogRovr shows you the news in an in-browser window you can resize or turn off completely. You can also choose how old your related news items can be.
As far as actual content goes, BlogRovr is not bad, but not great, either. Testing it here on FranticIndustries, I was able to predict when BlogRovr is going to show me something because I quickly learned which blogs that link to my content it has indexed and which not. I’m quite sure that this will improve in time, simply when they start indexing more sites.
After Marc Meyer’s clarification in the comments below, I must admit that the above paragraph is incorrect. Here’s what Marc has to say about it: “BlogRovr brings you ALL the posts linking to the site you’re visiting from ALL the blogs YOU choose. Its not about us indexing some and not other blogs. You choose what blogs you like, and that’s what we deliver to you.” Thus, the content I was delivered (or not delivered) had to do only with my choice of feeds.
However, a much bigger problem I’ve had with BlogRovr - and this might just be a personal thing - is that it’s constant popping out was annoying me. When I’m out to get news, I prefer to do it actively; and when I’m just browsing, I don’t want to constantly get updates on what other sites said about whatever site I’m on at the moment. Of course, I can always turn BlogRovr off, but after I had to do that a couple of times I’m afraid that many users might simply turn it off and never turn it on again.
Furthermore, on some sites you simply don’t ever want to get related news items, for example Netvibes. Folks at BlogRovr obviously know this, so they won’t bother you with news on sites like Google or Gmail, but they can’t cover all of them. A way to help solve this problem would be an option to manually set sites you don’t want BlogRovr’s widget to appear on.
Overall, BlogRovr really is a new way to browse news, but I’m afraid that another widget stealing your browser’s real estate might annoy many users. Think of it this way: if you’re the guy/girl that always has tickers, widgets and reminders popping out from everywhere, BlogRovr is right up your alley.
Go over to Read/Write Web for their review of BlogRovr, too.
Thanks for the review.
A clarification here on one very important issue.
BlogRovr brings you ALL the posts linking to the site you’re visiting from ALL the blogs YOU choose. Its not about us indexing some and not other blogs. You choose what blogs you like, and that’s what we deliver to you.
Rovr’s service does a real-time personalized search through any feeds you’ve told us about for blog posts about the page you’re on.
You can also “block” posts so they won’t show up again to disturb you, for example the netvibes thing. But then, when Arrington posts about netvibes once more, you will see it.
Hope that this makes things a bit clearer.
@Marc: thanks for the clarification, I must admit that I’ve misunderstood the concept slightly. I’ll fix it in the post.
Thanks Stan, and thanks for the suggestions and fixes.
The way I like to use Rovr is to set the tray to preview (slide in by itself) for posts newer than a week. I don’t like to keep it locked so the tray is always on. I also make the tray wide enough that I can some of the post summary in it, rather than just the icon for the blog it comes from.
Then I “block” stories I have already seen or don’t care about, and after a while I’m caught up on the sites I always come back to. We could put a “block all” button, but we wanted to keep it as simple as possible. We’ll certainly take your and other’s feedback into account.
BTW, if you’re reading any blog that you find interesting, you can add it to rovr at a click from the toolbar dropdown.
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