Beautifully designed product and site. One of my favorite aspects of Google Reader (may it rest in peace ) was being able to share articles effortlessly with my friends, without directly emailing or spamming on Facebook. Glad the Volley guys are making that easy again.
Thanks @andrewjiang. We're really excited about the future of reading on phones and always felt like it was missing the ease of following your favorite writer in the olden times of newspapers and magazines. Also we think a messaging style interface is the best way to discuss stories with your friends.
Would love any feedback, and we're super excited to hear from the great design/ product/programming minds on PH!
@mlchild love the design. just to intro Volley to PH:
1) why Volley over other competitors?
2) how do you guys monetize?
3) how did this idea come about?
@eriktorenberg Thanks Erik!
Our key differentiator is that Volley is focused on following people, not news sources or topic areas. If you add an 'author' in the app, you will receive their articles and blog posts automatically. This feels similar to RSS, but simpler.
Or, you can add friends and get the articles they recommend in a similar fashion. We don't try to algorithmically predict articles you'll like because we think the best filter of articles will be the authors you already read and the articles your friends specifically chose for you to see. You can use Volley with a small group of friends who you would otherwise be regularly e-mailing links back and forth with.
We are completely free for now (and ad-free), but we are exploring monetization ideas such as native advertising, a freemium model, or tollboothing certain content.
Max and I founded Volley because we wanted a better reading experience on mobile devices. We were also big fans of the Google Reader social features that were killed off in 2011. We loved being able to see and discuss articles our friends were recommending and wanted to bring that to a wider audience.
@jameswilsterman The app looks beautiful, downloading now. Always looking for new ways to streamline content discovery.
Can you recommend some top authors to follow?
@troblous We don't have an iOS8 beta at the moment, but we've been able to install it ourselves on iOS8 on our iPads. We plan to release completely stable iOS8 versions shortly.
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