Inform.com, a 55-person NYC-based news search startup, launched in beta today, and NYT covers it. The company has been formed by Neal Goldman, the former founder and CEO of CapitalIQ (which got bought out by McGraw-Hill last year for $225 million). The CEO e-mailed me last week to offer a test-drive before the formal launch, so I’ll try to be nice:
It fails miserably. It is the Bloglines-envy syndrome, as I call it. “Everythingitis”, as some would call. Everyone tries to beat down Bloglines, with the major complaints being it is slow and has not added features for the last year or so (both of those issues have been resolved now). But one point they miss: it is great at what it is supposed to do…be a newsreader. Simple. On the newsreader side, Rojo suffers from this syndrome..
The same syndrome mars Inform.com…it has all the features crammed in…. Besides, it does not work well at all on Opera, and has some feature disabled for Firefox. Another major fault: it goes for the pop-up-and-hiding-the-URL routine, a major no-no, if you ask me. So you cannot see the URLs of the third-party stories you’re going to…wow (that’s the behavior in Firefox). In IE, its optimum environment, it opens stories in a frame, again, with no URLs shown.
Too many categories, too many buttons, too many gimmicks (“Discovery Paths”?)…categorization at the cost of confusion: no thanks.
For people who remember, I gave a similar treatment to Amplify.com last year, a site which closed down subsequently.
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