VizReader is an RSS reader that also manages Twitter and various visualizations to connect the dots between the stuff you read.

It is written entirely in PicoLisp by me, Henrik Sarvell. The application is a result of dissatisfaction with Google Reader which I don't like for a variety of reasons, the main one being the GUI which feels cluttered and makes many default assumptions which are not sitting well with me.

First of all you can import feeds from Google Reader repeatedly, VizReader will take care of tagging new feeds while keeping old ones tagged just like before. That way you can use VizReader without ever importing directly in VizReader if you are worried about the reliability of the application.

Programmers might be interested in the more technical stuff.

The main design considerations for the application are these:

1.) Intuitive and clean GUI.

2.) Being able to make sense of the content being read through the use of various visualizations which also facilitate content discovery, hence the Viz in VizReader.

3.) Real time is cool; apart from being able to read Twitter VizReader also supports PubSubHubBub for real time updates of "normal" feeds too.

4.) Content is content; VizReader doesn't differentiate between Twitter posts or other posts, they therefore appear intermixed in various listings such as search results for instance. They are however displayed differently.

5.) Categorization and easy retrieval; feeds and articles are assigned to one or more labels/tags which in turn can be assigned to other tags to create arbitrary hierarchies. Articles can also be liked which is basically the same as a star in Google, a bookmark for easy retrieval. Sub categories are also possible, it works and looks pretty much like in this tutorial and demo.

6.) Community is power. At the moment there are no real community functions but that might change in the future, the "engine" is prepped for it... If need be.

Let's go through each point starting at the top with as much screen shots as possible, first the main view of the application. As you can see it's the typical three column layout (2 if a small resolution screen is detected). We've got a main menu at the top were we can do various things such as retrieve our Twitter feed or the complete Flow.

Over to the visualizations, at the moment there are three different kinds, normal link maps, Twitter link maps and maps of frequent words, aka. Trending.

Let's start with the one I like the most, the Twitter link map. In the image to the right (click it to see the big version) you can see connections made through the @ tag in my Twitter timeline during the day of Thaksin's trial. In the picture I have focused on @smartbrain who is a part of the Thaksin opposition. Note the heavy amount of cross linking going on between the Bangkokians, it's fairly easy to make out the Bangkok network in that link map. The main usefulness of this particular visualization though is being able to see who interesting people are referring to through their @ tags, it's a kind of content discovery in other words.

Talking about link maps, let's take a look at a normal link map of the content in my Economics tag. As with the Twitter map we have content that we subscribe to to the left and external content to the right. A few internal links can be spotted, in this case from Zero Hedge to Business Insider (I think). Double clicking any item will jump to the content opened in a new window. These link maps are generated through the use of an ActionScript library called Flare in case you wonder. As in the Twitter case these link maps are a good tool to quickly see what good sources of content are linking to, without actually having to go through all of the content.

Trending Word Maps is a good way of getting the main gist of the conversation, let's take a look at my trending Twitter map from that fateful day in Thai history. As you can see the words Thaksin, court and #judgementday were prominent. Clicking any word will launch a content search using that word. The word map exists not only for Twitter content, content filed under any tag or content in any particular feed can be used to generate them. As far as I'm concerned the word maps are not nearly as useful or interesting as the link maps, they are however good for getting a good overview of what's being currently discussed.

Let's move over to the real time stuff. As I said in #3 above there are two ways of accessing content in a real time fashion, well close anyway, the content is automatically updated every minute.

There is an exclusive Twitter feed where it's also possible to post Twitter updates. The Flow view can be configured to update with both Twitter updates and other content being pushed from sub hubs.

In the screen shot to the right you see a part of my flow, note that Seth Godin is too slow in announcing new content on his blog through his Twitter account. The content in question had been pushed through the sub hubs and arrived before his Twitter announcement, I have to give it to him though, he didn't get beaten by much, if @Jesse hadn't got a word in between then Seth's Twitter announcement would've been just next to his original post :)

In the flow picture above you can see Twitter posts intermixed with normal posts, here is another example. It could be a search result or any other listing.

Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think!