Bloglovin’, the Stockholm based startup that is making reading RSS feeds easier, has redesigned their site and added a bunch of improvements while doing so. Mattias Swenson, an active player in the Nordic startup scene and a co-founder of Bloglovin’, got in touch with us and told us about the improvement. Mattias told us that the facelift was mainly done for usablity purposes and I have to agree, the new site looks a lot better and intuitive. The layout of the new site can be seen at the end of this post.
The new layout is very Twitter like, but if people are used to using services this way why fight it. With the new layout and features, you are also able to categorise your blog posts into different categories. It’s actually somewhat of a nicer layout with the same features of Google Reader, when you think about it. And with the better layout, also a lot more nicer to use.
Another interesting factor Mattias told us is that they have over 150 000 registered members and 96% of them are female, aged 18-25 following fashion blogs. It seems Bloglovin has been able to grab this segment extremely well and one could debate on it if they should position themselves simply as an RSS reader for the ladies. I’m sure that market is up for grabs and the competition there is a lot milder when all the large companies are still competing for the attention of the techies (usually guys).
The new site:
The old site:
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
Looking good, and the emphasis on visuals is a good point of differentiation.
Somehow the new design immediately remined me of Fever: http://feedafever.com/
I haven’t used either so I can’t say whether there are any similarities between these products in their interaction design.