Bring it in, Betaworks

Two days ago Betaworks — creator of the popular iOS game Dots, the company behind Digg’s rise back to fame, and proud owner of Instapaper — opened Digg Reader to the public after greatly accelerating its development following the announcement of Google Reader’s impending demise. Especially for a product upon which work was not schedule to begin until the end of this year, Digg Reader is a very impressive entrant into the RSS reader market.

Ever since the site’s redesign, I have found myself going to Digg increasingly often in search of new and interesting things to read. And almost every time I do, I find something great — an article that, in all likelihood, I would not have come across otherwise. That’s more than I can say for every other news-based website I visit, much less those I browse on a daily basis. This seemingly unending stream of excellent prose has placed Digg near the center of my content consumption; with the release of Digg Reader, the company has moved one step closer to that nucleus, taking my favorite news site and primary content medium and bring them together in an attractively clean interface nothing short of a joy to use.

Digg Reader falls short in many areas: anyone arguing otherwise clearly has not used the service. It has a lot of potential though, potential that only time will bring out. And time was the one thing Betaworks did not have in the scramble to build and release a viable contender before Google Reader closed its doors. Now they do.

In the coming weeks and months as Betaworks continues to improve upon this new product, as I am sure they will, I will be looking forward to seeing tight Instapaper integration and interesting sharing options making use of the company’s core offerings. Betaworks has the opportunity to bring every aspect of my news gathering and processing workflow — the main Digg site, RSS, and Instapaper — to one app. Betaworks has that opportunity, and I believe they will capitalize on it.