All New Bloglines Launches in Beta

Bloglines, the grandfather of web based RSS readers, launched a new beta site this evening at beta.bloglines.com. Like everyone else these days, the most notable new feature is an Ajax customizable home page where users can drag and reorder feeds for a quick view.

Bloglines now has three viewing options - quick view (the new Ajax drag and drop view in the image to the left), three pane “Outlook-like” view and the classic full view with two panes. The site is also trying to manage unread feeds more intelligently, a common user complaint in the past.

The company says more changes are coming. Options for saving, sending and sharing stories, tools for building link blogs, managing blog rolls, etc. are all on the way. In the meantime, the classic bloglines site will remain available at bloglines.com. Feeds remain synced between the two sites.

Product iterations come very slowly at Bloglines, which was acquired by Ask.com in early 2005. The last major news from them was the integration of blog search over a year ago. Meanwhile, Google Reader has quickly grabbed the attention of the early adopter crowd, and is by far the most popular feed reader used by our readers according to Feedburner stats.

Richard MacManus has a much longer review of the product at Read/Write Web.

Polar Rose Debuts At Gnomedex

Polar Rose, a European startup that has a unique approach to recognizing faces in photos (remember Riya?), is having a bit of a pre-launch coming out party at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle today.

We first wrote about the company last December, way before they were ready to take beta testers. But even then it was clear that they were on to something. They use a browser plugin to allow users to tag people in photos anywhere on the web. They use those photos to construct a 3D image of the person, and then make educated guesses as to who is in untagged photos. See the post linked at the top of this paragraph for more details.

The company has been testing the service with a very limited number of beta users. The beta will expand significantly today, however. Every attendee of the Gnomedex conference will be able to register, and will be encouraged to tag photos of the event. A special page at Polar Rose was set up to show the tagged photos (none yet, the conference hasn’t started).

250 Polar Rose Beta Accounts Available

Polar Rose has also given us 250 beta accounts to give out immediately. Just send an email to techcrunch@polarrose.com. If you aren’t one of the first 250, you’ll be placed on the waiting list for the beta - more invites are coming every week.