Announcing BlogFire


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After a month in review, BlogFire is finally available on the App Store. Go get it now.

BlogFire is a dedicated feed reader app that offers real-time push notification for blog updates. Other notifier apps offer rss push, but they are not focused on the experience of a feed reader. There are many feed reader apps, but they are marketed to power users who know what RSS and "feed readers" are, and very few of them offer such integrated push notifications. BlogFire is aimed at mainstream users that just want to stay up-to-date with their favorite websites.

The simple landing page for BlogFire is http://www.blogfireapp.com/

One of the most frequest requests we received for Notifo was a way to subscribe to RSS feeds, so when a feed gets updated a push notification would be sent out. There were a few reasons we never built this directly into Notifo, but it got me thinking. What would an app solely dedicated to RSS notifications look and feel like? I started to get a picture in my head of what an average internet user would want out of such an app. Making it very simple to subscribe to feeds without having to know anything about "RSS" or "feed readers" was the main goal.

I think BlogFire turned out very well in that regard. There are options to add blogs with one touch by selecting from a list, or the user can enter in the website address and the app will discover the correct RSS feed address on its own. The app also uses the "apple-touch-icon" conventions to discover the avatar/icon to display in the app for any particular site.

There are also options to customize the push-notifications to make them less annoying. You can set quiet hours and a minimum time between notifications so you are not bombarded with alerts.

You can share posts you like on Twitter, Facebook, Email, and more. You can save them to Instapaper, Read It Later, Delicious, Pinboard, etc...

BlogFire may not be great for power users who already have their own favorite feed reader setup. BlogFire does not integrate with other feed reader accounts (yet). It was meant to be a very simple, low-friction app with no account required to get up and running as quickly as possible.

In some ways BlogFire is an experiment, but I think it has the potential to become pretty big. Think of it as the "Newsstand" app for any website with an RSS feed.

Go get BlogFire on the App Store now! It's free!

Follow @BlogFireApp on Twitter for updates.

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Tagged: apps iphone blogfire

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