Inform.com Doesn't

Company: Inform.com
Launched: October 16, 2005
Founder: Neal Goldman
Employees: 55
Location: New York

Inform.com launched today with a splashy New York Times article.

Steve Rubel has some kind words. Rafat Ali isn’t so kind – he says “It fails miserably.” I agree.

I honestly can’t figure out what it is, even after reading the Times fluff piece. They say its an RSS Reader but adding feeds is anything but easy. Newbies need simplicity. Oldbies want something that handles a ton of feeds efficiently. This does neither.

And if I simply want to know what’s hot in the blogophere, I use Memeorandum, which as I’ve said, is ugly as hell but it actually works. As an example, track this story on Memeorandum here.

What it does do well is break. Early and often. They warned me that it was optimized for IE, but I’m a firefox guy and I charged ahead. Bad idea. Also, URLs are hidden. The UI is unworkable – even my scroll wheel on my mouse is disabled on the site.

I try to find the good in new products, but I’m failing on this one. Please, tell me what I’m missing.