SilverReader – ultra fast Google Reader alternative

One of the side projects I’ve been working on for last three months is SilverReader – ultra fast RSS reader. My colleges and me have worked very hard to deliver you adequate Google reader successor.

Today I want to announce that SilverReader is finally available for public.

Speed and performance

We have fine tuned our product to deliver customers best speed and performance. Today with current number of users http://www.silverreader.com/ we are :
about 2x faster than Google reader ,
about 5x faster than Feedly web version ,
about 5x faster than AOL.Reader  and
about 8x faster than Digg reader .

We do realize that these products above have larger number of users so their servers are more loaded.
However we will also scale our servers with increasing number of users. This way we will try to stay with current performance numbers and deliver customers performance they deserve.

User interface

We have created clean and simple user interface. Here is a screenshot of main UI :

MainPage

Easy transition from Google reader or other RSS readers

We have implemented one click migration from Google Reader.
When you login with Google account you can with one click import your subscriptions and folders from Google Reader. We do not support migration of bookmarks and tags.

We also have option of import/export via OPML file. Migration usually finishes in less then a sec for 10K subscriptions.

Security

Security is very important to us. Unlike some of our competitors we do support secure connection (HTTPS) on login and optionally trough entire application (if someone want to receive all articles encrypted) .

Technologies we used

We created SilverReader as SPA – Single Page Web Application. This way we can give customers some advanced features that aren’t available in traditional web applications.
SilverReader has been created with following mayor tools / frameworks:
Database : Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Backend :  ASP.NET Web API, ASP.NET MVC
Frontend : Knockout.js, Durandal, JQuery, HTML5

Help and support

We strongly believe in customer feedback . You can vote and suggest any feature using our suggestion page . We also have a rich help content you can read on this location .
In next few months we will constantly improve our product. We want to give you some great new features but without affecting simplicity of UI.

Our business model

Our business model is rather simple. We will always have a free version you can use (will be always fully functional for reading feeds). Later we will add premium account option which will offer some more advanced features to more demanding users.

Phone and Tablet usage

In v1 SilverReader does not support responsive design (design optimized for smaller devices) .
Our user interface is very complicated so we haven’t got time to optimize it for smaller devices.
We also haven’t got time to create Android, IOS and WP applications.

As you can see when you login into SilverReader we are committed to deliver our customers high quality products.

We are aware how smaller devices are important and we will work hard in next two months to deliver you high quality Android, IOS and WP applications.

What’s next ?

This is beginning of series of articles where I will reveal you how we have build this excellent product.
I will cover ASP.NET Web API part as well as SPA part of our application.
Stay tuned for more news.

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