In this digital age we are used to reading personal statuses from friends whom we are following via several social media mediums, but sometimes we don’t really care if they are eating, on their way to the office, etc. However, we might be interested in the content they read or browse through the web. When you follow friends using social media it is because you share a common interest, thus, you would like to browse suggested content based on their readings. Perfect timing, here is when Readness comes up.
Let’s find out more about privacy and Readness features.
Overview
Readness is a free extension for the Google Chrome browser that allows us to get recommendations about what our friends have read, and also allows us to send suggestions to friends about content based on what we browse the web so far.
This extension is very helpful for discovering new authors and topics based on what you read the most, the install is easy and offers many nice features.
Overview
Extensions are little apps which you can customize in your browser and add extra features that you like. You just need to visit the extensions gallery from Google Chrome, find one that suit your needs, download it, make a couple of clicks in dialogs, and you are done.
Features
Readness is simple, once you have installed the extension in your browser you will be able to start sharing the content you read. Every time you are reading an article or news story you will see a little disk icon on the top right of your browser’s toolbar, when this icon is blue in color means that the extension is remembering the content you are actually reading; when the icon is faded out (gray color) the article you are reading is not being remembered and the Readness servers won’t record the url in its database. However, what if you don’t want an article to be remembered?
You will have 15 minutes to press “Do not remember Article” before your friends read it.
Features
Readness only remembers the articles that match with its white list, if any site is black listed and you try to add it, the extension wouldn’t record the url. You are able to consult the sites within the white list in the following link: http://readness.com/sources/whitelist
You are only allowed to add friends from Facebook, once you add them you will be able to see their readings (of course if they are using the extension as well). In fact, you don’t need to register yourself on any Readness form because you log into your profile using your existing Facebook details.
Starring articles is another great feature in this nice extension, the articles you are interested in can be starred, then they are saved in a favorites tabs inside your application profile. When an article is already saved you can read it by yourself going to the History tab within your profile, articles are sortered by the date and time they were saved. When reaching the end of each article you find a slider suggesting you related and popular articles that you might like.
Features
Readness is more than just reading and getting suggestions, you can find a pretty cool feature called “Quests”; these are challenges to make things in your profile more exciting, you get badges and titles by completing the quests. An example quest might be to research and explore “The Most Useful Mac Tools and Utilities”, then if you read 6 articles about this topic you will earn a new badge or title.
Privacy
Privacy is one the things that really concerns us when we expose our data in Internet. You might be asking yourself how Readness takes care about your privacy?
The first thing we have found is that Readness doesn’t show off your readings to people who are not your friends and they only remember articles from websites than you have read within the white list of news sites.
The app doesn’t remember HTTPS sites, this protocol is ignored by servers, then you can be quiet about secure data being exposed.
Privacy Features
In addition to privacy, Readness doesn’t share your data with third parties, your details wouldn’t be sold or shared to anyone. Also, you are able to hide your articles from friends by just clicking an icon at the browser’s toolbar.
Social Media
We all are huge fans of Social Media, we are always looking forward to see if our favorites applications are fully integrated with Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you would like to add friends on Readness then you are just allowed to do it through Facebook, also you are just allowed to invite friends from Facebook.
Social Media Integration (Facebook)
You would love to set up your Twitter account to connect with Readness events, application offers the possibility to tweet things that are just happening inside your profile like getting new titles, earning new badges or new articles.
Social Media Integration (Twitter)
Final Thoughts
Overall, I find Readness is a great social application for those who are interested on reading content in serious environment. Though its interface is simple and clean which is really good because we don’t really need too much advanced features for just reading and sharing articles or content.
I think the application could integrate more social media sites, perhaps this would allows us to find more people to follow and read interesting content from them; in my case I couldn’t find a single contact in Facebook from my friends list using Readness then it would be great trying to find them in Twitter, most of the people who I would like to read content from are at Twitter.
Also, I don’t know how easy is to develop this extension for other browsers, but it would be definitely a nice improvement since Firefox for example is more popular than Google Chrome, which means that Readness could get more users to use the extension.