Particls - An Addictive Way to Follow the Web
by
on April 16, 2007,
When I was taking Peepel for a drive, CEO Stephen Kelly was kind enough to give me an invite to the private beta of Particls (called Touchstone) at the time, an application that was promising to revolutionize the way you read news feeds. I'll be honest; I was a bit skeptical. I've downloaded and subsequently removed more apps in the past year than my hard drive likes to think about. I've been using Particls now for a little over a week, and I'm hooked. I'm not sure how I'd get through my day without it.
As a writer, especially a professional blogger, I blog on several different topics besides Web 2.0. Staying on top of my RSS feed is crucial, but it gets painful after a while slogging through over 300 feeds to find the newsworthy items. Enter Particls, which not only searches my existing feeds (simply output an OPML file from your chosen reader and import to Particls), but can also crawl the web for me, searching for news on keywords I tell it to find.
Particls is a little Big-Brother-like, since I know it's watching my every move. However, it's watching to see what articles I'm reading and which ones I'm skipping over, learning a little bit more about my preferences and acting accordingly, almost like voice recognition software learns your pronunciations. Best of all, it's customizable, depending how involved you want to be with your information feeds. Right now, I just fired it up, and it just hit me with a few pop-ups for articles I may have missed. I also have my ticker running along the top, scanning headlines even as I write this article. You can also custom-set your level of interruption for each item; for example, I have Pebbles and Pop-Ups set to only send me items Particls deems "Very Important" while I have most of my feed items running in the Ticker so I can scan them as I'm working. Clicking on the article headlines in the feeds gives you a small excerpt from the article, and allows you to delete the article from your view, save the article for later reference (leaving a little box on your desktop), go right to the article, or send it to sites like Digg, Reddit, or Del.icio.us right from Particls.
Particls currently supports RSS and Atom, and at some point in the future, hopes to add an adapter for general web sites, a la Dapper. (I have to admit that a Dapper/Paricls Mash-up would be like HEAVEN for me!) It also uses a lot of system RAM, so if you are memory-challenged like I am at the moment, you may have to choose between applications to keep it running (I have this problem with 70- and 80-tab Firefox windows that also eat memory like potato chips). And it currently doesn't have a Mac version, although another dedicated user has it up and running on a Mac using Parallels. Aside from those two small grousings, I'm in love. And I'm going to miss it dearly when I switch over to Mac later this year.
UPDATE: Interested in trying Particls out? Profy has an invitation for you so send emails to particls@profy.com, we will invite you to test Particls right away.
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kalipso
Mav
Orient expresS
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
Would absolutely love an invite to this beta. If you get any invites I would be willing to get on my (cyber) knees and beg for an invite.
Thanks!
Your wish is my command.
Stop back and let me know how you like it!
If you have another invite available, I’d love to get my hands on this. Especially for the Web 2.0 Expo. I hear that they are utilizing Particls.
I’m also a bit skeptical about this one, specially when you said “ram consuming”…
How does it handle your TMZ issue?
leslie, what is a “tmz issue”?
Jonix, I only have 1 GB in this machine, and when I run just about ANYTHING with Firefox, it hurts. I have it running right now with the ticker disabled, but Pebbles and Pop-ups on, and it’s running between 65 and 80MB or so. Not exorbitant if you have 2GB or more in your machine, and/or aren’t running as many things in the background as I am, but It’s definitely the top hitter for RAM after Firefox on my machine.
Leslie, excellent question! What Leslie is referring to is the tendency of some buggy feeds to duplicate posts multiple times, leaving you to sort through 100+ “items” when it’s more like 5 new articles. The celebrity site TMZ’s feed does this, as does InformationWeek’s. Since Particls views all items and only sends things based on importance, I don’t have to look at the doubles. Once I have it fully trained, I may never look at Google Reader again.
Hi everyone - Chris here from Particls.
Cyndy, thanks for such a great review - you put big smiles on all our faces.
Since interest on Profy is so high we may have to give you some more invites to pass around.
Regarding the memory - it is an issue we have identified as a key opportunity for improvement so we are working on it as I type. Please stay tuned to the next few builds and you should see an improvement.
Regarding Duplicates - many on the team are actually bald. It is not a genetic thing - they were the ones assigned with solving the Duplicates issue. You see, RSS feeds are not all created equal and are often VERY bad at keeping structured data, well, structured.
We have worked very, very hard to limit duplicates because we feel it is even more important with Particls than a normal reader. It may not be 100% perfect, but we have tried hard to solve 90% of cases and will continue to refine as we can.
Hope this answers some questions for you!
I’m interested in hearing that you turned off the ticker. This is great news for us because the fact that Particls is reconfigurable for your needs is key. Can you imagine any other display types (besides ticker/popups) that might be useful to you also?
Cheers, Chris
Cindy, the problem is that i only have 768mb, and this is an “intensive” used pc, for programming and web development. I cannot afford to have a program that use so many resources.
Hi,
This sounds like a very intriguing product. I’d love to try it out. Do you have any more invites? I’m so overwhelmed with trying to keep up with all the feeds that I have. It would be great to have a tool that could smartly filter out the irrelevant stuff.
Thanks!
Mai
Mai, it’s great you are interested in Particls, Im sure you’ll love it as soon as you try it. I will invite you right away if you send your email to particls@profy.com.
By the way, if anyone else is interested in an invite, feel free to send emails to particls@profy.com, we have some 100 invites for our readers.