Squire is a turbo pack for Google Reader, tailor-made for busy journalists and information junkies.
Follow more types of content (like email), filter out the noise and collaborate with colleagues.
Google Reader allows you to keep track of websites and blogs. With Squire, you can also add twitter accounts, Facebook pages, email inboxes and, soon, web scrapers.
Filter and modify feeds with a couple of clicks, so you only get the content you need, in the format you choose. If you want, we'll automatically mark feed items as read after a couple of days, to keep your unread count manageable.
With Squire, you keep reading your feeds in your favorite feed reader. We help you manage your subscriptions and keep the noise at bay, your reader does the rest. We like Reeder for Mac, RSS Bandit for Windows and Google's own Reader in any web browser.
Squire keeps track of your Google Reader notes and favorites, and we make it easy to publish those to Tumblr, WordPress or on any site, through our widgets.
If you're processing thousands of feeds a day, things can get a little hairy. Squire transparently synchronizes colleagues' subscriptions and read/unread statuses — no double work.
So is Squire a feed reader, then?
Great question. It's not. Squire allows you to make feeds out of things that aren't as well as filter and modify existing feeds, but after it's worked its magic, it passes on the torch to whatever feed reader you use. We handle subscriptions, your feed reader is where you read stuff.
Is Squire just for journalists?
The features we offer are targeted towards people who have to wade through tons and tons of information every day: journalists, marketeers and PR professionals. But really, anyone who feels like they want to get more out of feed reading should give it a spin — it's free!
Can I use Squire in feed readers other than Google Reader?
Actually, yes you can. For your convenience, Squire can sync up your subscriptions with Google Reader, but if you don't mind some manual copy-pasting you can also just grab the plain URL for any filtered or generated feed (like, from an email address) and use that in whatever reader you prefer.
Why build a subscription manager instead of a feed reader?
We think other people have more or less figured out how to build a great feed reader. We like the user experience as it is. It's just that feed readers don't really help you manage information overload quite as well as they should, and they don't accept enough types of information streams. We're trying to solve those two core problems, and we think we'll have an easier job of it if we can leverage the power of a great existing feed reader: Google Reader.
We may at one point decide to turn Squire into an actual feed reader, to give you a convenient all-in-one package, but that's not on the radar just yet.
Will Squire have an API?
Not currently, but I'd be interested to hear how you'd use a Squire API if there was one. Let me know!
Will I be able to make new filters and manglers for Squire?
Yes you can! We'll have extensive webhook support, giving you a very easy way to add new functionality to Squire. As a matter of fact, all of the built-in filters are implemented as webhooks.
Chances are, you or your colleagues are already using a feed reader like Google Reader to keep track of the news and find inspiration for stories in the myriad conversations that are happening online.
Why? Because you don't want be that guy or girl who keeps rehashing old tweets or catching up to the latest events. You don't want to track trends, you want to create them. You want to give your readers something fresh, point them to obscure gems nobody else is talking about yet.
We help by turning Google Reader from a consumer application into a powerhouse for information professionals, allowing you and your team to find more cool stuff, faster.
Squire will be available free of charge at squire.io before the end of the summer, and getting started will be as simple as logging in with your Google account — no setup required.
Squire will launch with support for regular feeds, email and twitter streams. And you'll be able to let our software filter those streams by topic and length, translate feed items, and fetch the full content for abbreviated feeds.
We have many more generators, filters and modifiers planned after that. Additionally, we're also looking at ways to help journalists with the publication process, for example by providing easy ways to publish a linklog of your favorite content to WordPress and Tumblr. We'd love to hear your suggestions.
Although the premise behind Squire — making feeds out of things that aren't — seems difficult if not impossible, it's actually pretty doable as long as the service we're integrating with has a public API or an accepted protocol we can interface with. That's the case for twitter, Delicious, Facebook, email inboxes (IMAP) and many more of the kind of data streams that we'd like to tap. Each of these streams will be molded into regular ATOM feeds.
Because there's no generic approach that'll magically turn any kind of data into a feed, each adapter will require a couple of hundred lines of programming. It's not a free lunch, but it ain't rocket science either.
The basic squire.io stack will be a Ubuntu server with Varnish (for caching), NGINX and Unicorn (for serving), Ruby on Rails (for the web app), Sinatra (for some of the generators and filters) and SQLite as the database layer.
I'm picking Ruby for this project because it has excellent libraries to interact with each of the various APIs Squire depends on, which should speed up the development process. However, different filters and generators will be implemented as separate RESTful webservices, so it'll be easy to add in other technologies (like Python for natural language analysis) wherever it makes sense.
Having prototyped key parts of the application already, I don't foresee any big difficulties in getting Squire to work. It doesn't rely on unproven technology, and it is (mainly) a single-user application, so it doesn't require any network effects to be useful either.
This project is purposefully kept small and focused so I know that building it will be realistic — I'm leveraging the power of Google Reader to do the heavy lifting, and just add some much-needed sugar on top.
Nevertheless, here are some pain points that we need to be aware of.