Spreed makes reading RSS feeds faster, stressful
Friday, August 1st, 2008
Web based RSS feed aggregator Spreed is casual reading’s worst enemy. A speed reader extraordinaire like Robert Scoble might enjoy it as a way to dig through even more stories a day, but at its heart it’s kind of like visiting an aquarium with one of those moving sidewalks; you’re still seeing what you came there to see–you just don’t have the luxury of taking your time.
Time is actually the key focus of Spreed. It centers around a speed reading player that will only show you three or four words of a story at a time, and in rapid succession. As your reading skills improve you can ramp up the amount of words per minute it shows you, letting you speed read any story at whatever level you’re capable of. Sure you could do this on your own, but Spreed forces you to look at nothing else but the words, making reading a distraction-free, yet slightly anxiety-inducing experience.
Like Netvibes, My Yahoo and others, Spreed has a built-in directory of RSS feeds you can subscribe to. What makes it neat is that it gives you a estimation of how long it will take to go through a story based on its length and your current WPM setting. It also shows you the time it thinks it would take you to read the story in non-speed read mode, along with a link in between the two to jump to the site itself. You can even plug in Microsoft Word documents, effectively making it a free speed reading training tool.
In addition to the desktop flavor Spreed has an iPhone variation that will let you access your bookmarked feeds and read them using the same speed viewer. It too has a quick WPM selector in case you want to dial it up a notch.
Ideally in the future Spreed could come out with a browser plug-in or bookmarklet that will take any story or RSS entry and run it through its player, letting you use a more capable RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines to add in some of the features it’s missing like link sharing, folders, and favoriting.
[via SimpleSpark]
Spreed takes full RSS feeds and makes them easy to parse with a speed reading player. You can tweak how many words per minute you want to read at and it will adjust accordingly. (click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Go here to read the rest:
Spreed makes reading RSS feeds faster, stressful
