The Vostok blog

You’re a Bloglines user and still haven’t found a feed reader up to par? Check out Planetaki. Create an account, import your feeds and start reading in less than four minutes. Skeptical are you?

Here’s a quick realtime demo. Check it out for yourself:

It’s gratifying to see how a product that is created to satisfy need ‘x’ can, when put in the hands of users, also satisfy needs ‘x, ‘y’ and ‘z’.

We have been surprised to see:

1. Planetaki as tourism guide

2. Planetaki as expo hub

3. Planetaki as classroom hub

4. Planetaki as documentation hub

4. Planetaki as cookbook

5. Planetaki as specialized information bulletin

We believe that Planetaki‘s stress-free stream of information approach is what makes it so versatile.  If you give Planetaki any other creative uses, drop us a line.

Twitter = (kind of like Planetaki) one single stream of information organized in chronological order.  (WIN)

Online newspapers = columns, too much information clustered into categories, no apparent distinction between important and less important info, Ads. (FAIL)

Why would anyone think a mashup of these two would be a good idea? Giving up all the good stuff and taking on all the bad. Well, we have found out through bitelia that paper.li has done it. In a nutshell: paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format.

Sounds like a good idea? You bet! (if you like your twitter feed full of ads that is).

bitelia’s newspaper (hope they don’t mind us using their newspaper as an example).

In this video Timo gives us an update on the iPad app for Planetaki and shows us a preview of what’s to come. We hope to have it ready in a month.

In short:

• new design
• improved legibility
• ability to read posts offline
• fixed theme but customizable backgrounds

Hi Everybody,

I just wanted to say thanks for sending a t-shirt all the way to Alaska! You have a great portfolio. Keep rockin’ the minimalism.

Mikaela

No, thank you Mikaela!

Alicia Chen did the Chinese (Mandarin) translation of Planetaki and now it’s available for you to use.  You can switch languages from the “preferences” link on the top right-hand of your planet. FYI: Planetaki is also available in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Galician and Romanian.

Here’s the announcement in video. Enjoy (especially after 32s).

Thank you Alicia

We’re looking to translate Planetaki to the following languages:

• Russian
• Hindi
• Dutch
• Arabic
• Greek
• Turkish
• Korean
• Polish
• Slovenian
• Bulgarian

Planetaki’s a small startup with little funds so we can’t pay you for your job, but we’ll give you a cool gift and you’ll have your name on the credits If you’re interested give us a shout hello@vostok.es

So far, the lanaguages available are:

• Spanish
• English
• French
• Italian
• Galician
• Romanian

And the ones that are in process, and you’ll be able to use soon, are:

• Chinese (Mandarin)
• German
• Portuguese
• Euskera
• Catalan

WARNING: Here comes a rather technical post. Stay away if you are here just for the fancy videos and occasional eyecandy…

As part of the rebuilding of Planetaki we’ve switched from MySQL databases to MongoDB. It is quite a big change and the results are already noticeable. You can feel the wond in your face when in front of your planet. It’s fast, very fast.

Sam wrote a post about how it’s all set up. The techie inside you will enjoy it. Here are a few excerpts:

Planetaki caches huge amounts of data from posts all over the internet resulting in very large rows. The result is that the traditional database caching and optimisation techniques just aren’t as effective, and Planetaki was getting progressively slower and harder to manage.

[...]

Planetaki now uses a hybrid solution for storing data. The complex feeds and their entries are stored in MongoDB, and user data is stored in a traditional Postgresql database. This allows us to split the system into two parts, on one side we have the feed “reaping”, and on the other the website which mainly accesses the tables of data.

Read the full article: Planetaki powered by MongoDB

So yesterday we were googling Planetaki (you know, just for kicks) and were surprised to find out that a couple of months ago one of Spain’s leading newspapers, El País, did a small article on it. You can read it here.

Sam Lown has been recently tweaking the web version of Planetaki. He has made some improvements and minor alterations for a new version that’ll be released this Summer. Watch the video for more info.