- Screenshots: We're going to have those up on the home page shortly.
- Differentiated User experience: We've really worked hard at making it as easy as possible for users to fulfil certain tasks. Our objective is to have the functionality be self-evident and not require a manual or a help page to use the website. We have some pretty powerful customization options.
- This is a great point. We're just about coming to parity w.r.t Google reader-like functionality and we're late. However we believe our next release which will focus on personalization and making greater use of user training data will set us apart and deliver highly tailored relevant news to our users, cutting down the clutter.
Wouldn't that be a basic requirement for any well-designed mass-market web application? I certainly didn't need any help pages to figure out Google Reader or NewsBlur (which I'm very happy with, by the way) or any of the half-dozen other RSS reader sites I've tried.
• Users can be reasonably expected to browse a landing page before committing to signing up or demoing software, but they can not be reasonably expected to sign up or go through a series of pages to then see the pictures and cool reasons to join
• Corollary to my first point, this isn't "cool" enough - by that I mean, NewsBlur for example has a vibrant, expressive, slick landing page. It also details much more information than this landing page does. It gives readers an incentive to actually sign up and check out the service, if not use it completely. This does not give solid reasons that differentiate it from competitors
• Segue from my last point, what's the wow factor? What's different about Swarm that competitors like NewsBlur don't have?
• What are you doing that shaves off the disadvantage of being a late entry to the race to replace Google Reader (by several months)? This is a not insignificant harm to your traction potential if you can't figure out a core competency or feature the other competitors don't have. It will be very difficult to displace NewsBlur and Feedly at this rate.
This isn't meant to discourage you. Just wondering.