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NMH: Rojo, Out of Box Xperience

On a lark, I requested an account on Rojo.com through an e-mail address posted in Jeremy Zawodny's Web 2.0 summary on the company. In case you're a newcomer (apparently there's something of an upsurge in interested folks) I'm a bit of a webfeed aggregator nut, even claiming to do some research on supporting technologies. So joining Rojo is a natural.

I'm planning on reporting in ongoing depth on my experience using Rojo, but I have to say the out of box experience was less than compelling. First, I took the default set of feeds for a new user. It's a large number, which isn't a problem, except that you have a ton of items in each feed, so out of the box a naive user is facing information overload.

My second issue has to do with the way social networking is integrated. In short, it's Friendster style as opposed to del.icio.us style. You have to invite people in as opposed to being able to easily see what other people are doing.

The interface does seem nice though. That might sound like small potatoes, but doing a good interface in a browser is no small feat.

The option A out of the box experience seems broken to me, though. I'm overwhelmed, not much of an obvious way to catch up, and I have to work to connect to people. I must admit that I am way biased as a webfeed aggregator power user and a Bloglines user to boot, so I may be just the wrong audience. But I haven't dug in, so all is not lost.

By the by, if you'd like a Rojo invite, send me some e-mail. No guarantees, but they do allocate a fixed number to pass out.

Update I'm out of Rojo invites. A recent (Feb 4, 2005) rush of publicity seems to have quite a few folks now looking for them.

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