Like so many others, I’m very curious about the future fate of Kinja, the weblog guide, which was just released this week in beta.
It’s got a great number of things going for it. With sweet kid gloves, it makes keeping up on weblogs easy. Adding and subtracting weblogs is as simple as clicking a button on your browser or popping the site URL into Kinja’s add form. It’s got a nice albeit slightly cluttered interface. And it’s got the power of the good folks that invented Gizmodo, Fleshbot, Gawker and Gizmodo behind it.
Here’s the problem: I don’t know why I would actually use it on a very regular basis. Yahoo has a great new (also beta version) RSS aggregator built into My Yahoo! that allows new posts to be seen right from your home page without scrolling down and hurting the forefinger. The design of Kinja is nice but it doesn’t allow one to organize the weblogs by category as Jason Kottke pointed out to me; it would be nice if I could organize the blogs I read by “politics,” “technology,” and “bug spray,” for instance. Preferably, there should be a tabbed interface to control these things.
Finally, what is the business model for this site? It’s not clear. But, it’s a great and highly flexible tool for keeping up on a few blogs and it makes checking on new posts actually pleasurable, something My Yahoo! can probably never do.