Life is grand

So Twitter is nice to have in the background bumbling away but like many programmers I am paranoid I will miss something (admit it all you programmers; you read every single RSS item, every single email and anything that scrolls too fast to read completely is annoying as fek. Programmers want 100% solutions, not 80% or 99.999% solutions.)

Thankfully your Twitter stream comes in RSS (actually, atom) too and you can use a simple feed keyword filter system like FeedRinse to catch any tweets/twits you miss. Here is one I made on my Twitter stream that looks for “@paul” which is how it seems most of my Twitter buddies ping messages at each other.

Simple and Twitter didn’t have to provide the functionality. Yahoo! Pipes could provide an even more complex Twitter filter setup.

I just spotted Kottke Komments and had a further little idea; Create a site that allows anyone to punch in a feed URL and start commenting on the items. So Kottke Komments but any feed URL.

Some problems would be multiple feed URLs for one conceptual feed (e.g. an Atom and an RSS 2.0 feed URL), objections by the author of the feed (would that be an issue?), good old spamming (though I guess spammers wouldn’t get the page-link authority score as it isn’t on the original site) and just general abuse (Kottke doesn’t want comments on his site, maybe he doesn’t want comments on any of his posts?)

I’ll see if I can whip up a prototype and launch it this week. Anyone want to help?

Sometimes you wonder if reviewers are simply meeting word counts when they make statements like this:

For example, a search for feeds related to ecology retrieved only 41 items–quadruple what Google Reader found, but Bloglines turned up 383 and Newsgator Online dug up 68

The use of “only” tells me that 41 is bad while 383 is good. What about quality though? Did the reviewer spend a few minutes going through Bloglines’ 383 results? Rojo’s 41 might be 41 brilliant sources while Bloglines’ 383 sources might have just 3 quality sources.

I am complaining because this isn’t some part-time reviewer but a paid reviewer on CNet. If they aren’t going to spend the time doing proper reviews I am not sure I need to bother checking them against the millions of blogs out there offering the same but in a better format. No wonder their traffic is slipping.

And if you were wondering I prefer Bloglines to Rojo but think Bloglines’ “related” results are next to useless.

The “next” bookmarklet feature of Google Reader is an interesting one. You never need visit your feed aggregator with it. Just hit it everytime you want to read the latest unread item in your RSS reading list and it will take you straight to the referenced page.

I think it can be improved though. For a lot of my reading list it is pretty useless. I click next, have to wait for the page to load, see if I like the page and then hit next again. Hundreds of times on a busy day. Part of the point of an aggregator is letting you quickly skim over hundreds of items looking for interesting ones to read further on.

But some feeds I know I want to read each item. e.g. a Flickr photo stream or a GMail feed. So why not let me specify a folder that the next feature works off of exclusively. Or let me create a custom next bookmarklet attached to a couple of feeds, or to a tag.

Fullfeeds.com wants you to sign a petition asking that feed providers include full articles and not just summaries in their RSS/Atom/etc. feeds.

At first glance it seems a worthy cause but after a bit of thinking I am actually not going to sign it even though I use RSS everyday and am working on an RSS project. Why? Take the BBC feeds for instance. Just summaries, no full articles. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the BBC feeds had full articles? Actually, no it wouldn’t. I use the BBC feeds just as they intend, as a way to quickly browse the news and then link through for more in depth reading of that news item. The summary serves a very specific purpose; it is a quick sound-bite of the whole article. It isn’t the same as taking a full article and displaying just the first paragraph. At least that is how it should be (the BBC feeds do just take the first paragraph. Thankfully they are well written but many articles on other sites do not have first paragraphs that summarise the whole article.)

The other factor is download size. If the BBC published full articles their feeds would be a lot weighter. On broadband on our desktops, no problem. On mobile phones with GPRS it bites. And that is where I use the BBC feeds most. Even more of a reason just to have a summary.

The petition should be that feed publishers understand the usage of their feeds fully and then make a choice. Feed publishers should not be told how to publish their feeds. Badgering them to include full articles is the wrong approach. Lets educate publishers so that they don’t fear the effect of full articles (strangely it is a good effect rather than the traffic sapping one publishers think it is.)

We won’t even go near the topic of RSS as an alert mechanism for so much more than just wordy articles.

FeedDemon’s solution to a tough problem is elegant and simple. The problem is how does one find popular items within the feeds one cares about. Other systems are applying all sorts of voting systems, tagging pools, text analysis and “machine learning” which is all well and good but often doesn’t work quite the way one expects.

FeedDemon says “count the number of referrals and list from highest to lowest.” Simple. That it is applied just to the feeds you are subscribed to makes it so much more powerful. You have already gone to the trouble of selecting the feeds you care about so why throw that out in favour of some complex “blogosphere wide” analysis engine that gets it wrong a good deal of the time.

Google’s feed reader has undergone a radical redesign. So radical it now resembles every other feed reader out there. The previous incarnation was loved by a few and disliked by many. It was an interesting experiment but was not succesful, unlike the GMail interface.

At first glance it is a Bloglines copy; 2 panes showing feeds on one side and items on the other. You click a feed or folder and all the unread items are displayed in a river of news down the right. You can organise by folder, you can star items, email them, share (more on that later) and add tags. Nothing exceptional and certainly not stunning (I am worried when people call a minor step forward as “stunning.”)

There are some good features though and I imagine Google Reader will follow GMail in being an incrementally improving product.

The share feature lets you mark an item as shared and this is then added to a publically available web-page which has its own Atom feed. This is useful as it lets you broadcast to the world any items you find interesting.

It is limited though in that you can’t branch the sharing out to different groups. Thankfully the tagging feature comes into play here. You can add tags to any item and then make that tag public. You can then share the public tag link with other Google Reader users and they can subscribe to it. You could tag items to target specific groups of friends and co-workers. This is a very useful feature though I’d prefer if it displayed as the sharing feature does as currently the public tags require you to be using the Google Reader.

Another novel feature is that, unlike Bloglines where clicking a feed or folder marks all unread items in it as read, Google Reader will track your scrolling and only mark as read the items you have scrolled past. This makes it very easy to start reading a list of unread items, close the reader and then come back to where you last where.

Starring like in GMail works well, useful for coming back to items later to read. The feed management interface is a bit clunky but works well enough for now.

One thing I have noticed is that Bloglines seems to be faster both in using and in noticing updates in feeds. Hopefully Google Reader catches up in those two regards.

All in all it is Bloglines plus some useful features and mechanisms. I like it but feel it is hardly ground breaking and that there is so much more potential in aggregator applications. I will be swapping to Google Reader not because it is stunning but because it is mildly better.

The Times Reader is an interesting project between the New York Times and Microsoft. For Microsoft it is a technology demonstration, in this case .NET 3.0 (WinFX really) and for the Times it is an exploration of delivering readable content to screens. The web and even most desktop software makes for a bad reading experience. Low DPI, wide blocks of text, poor fonts and, especially on the web, little if any typograhic control.

The Times Reader aims to make reading on the screen easy on the eyes. Using the Microsoft technology it offers the Times’ fonts, builds in readable columns and uses up all the screen real estate it can to present what looks very much like a print newspaper on your screen.

Here are a few screenshots of it in action though I recommend you download it and give it a go to see the layout technology at work (it is a Windows XP/Windows Vista only app, no Mac or Linux versions.)

When you first load it the app downloads a complete set of articles from the server. It then periodically synchronises allowing you to later use the app and read articles offline. As you can see it mimics a newspaper layout. On the right you will see some articles are just being displayed as headlines. If I made the window bigger the summaries of each would start to be displayed and the layout would change.

Along the top you have the different sections which smoothly flips the view from topic to topic.

Here you can see the front page after I have resized the window to a smaller area.

Clicking a headline/article takes you to the article view:

The article is nicely displayed in columns and flows around the image. You can see an advert in this screenshot but not all articles display an advert. If the full article was too long to fit on this one view then the page control (bottom right) would let me flip to the next page. It is a bit fiddly though as you have to click the little arrows rather than a bigger region.

You can also see the text-size control in the bottom left. As you adjust this the view automatically re-flows itself to fit. Honestly though the sizing is in steps and is quite jumpy. I’d have preffered something smoother.

You can go to the next article using the control near the bottom right. The arrows are once again a bit small but the transition to the next article is quite smooth.

An article has several tools one of which lets you annotate with a pen. Handy if a bit limited (other users can’t see it for instance.)

The search has three views one of which is this fluid diagram that shows an article with its assigned “topics” radiating out from it. Topics are much like tags.

Clicking on a topic takes you to a view which shows all articles tagged with that topic:

The other search view shows a grid layout of all stories that match your search, sorted by relevance (as indicated by the litte filled in dots):

Then onto the News in Pictures view which is very, very simple:

It simply takes all the photos in the paper and displays them one after the other with captions. A gallery would have been ideal and also links back to the originating articles.

I am not convinced of the usefulness of the What’s Read but it is an interesting view. It shows you each section with little squares that on roll-over display an article you have read. I would have liked an indicator next to each article title on any page to show that I have read it (much like links on the web change colour.)

All in all the Times Reader is interesting and works quite well. My main problem with it is that it is a separate, desktop app. bound to one OS. We need to get this technology into the browser.

Microsoft Max started out as an interesting technology demonstration around photos. It has now strangely added RSS to its bag of tricks.

While it is not meant to become your default feed aggregator it does have some interesting techniques to watch out for. The newspaper layout is nothing new to feed aggregators but this one is done particularly well with what I think is the best flow and layout around. It also makes use of the powerful typographic rendering of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation.) The feed list down the left is also nicely done and useful for non-power users who only have a few subscriptions. It displays the latest bit of news in the actual subscription list.

Newzie has a fascinating and well implemented colour system that denotes the last update time/date of a feed. The colouring is a bit bold for my tastes but the idea is sound and I found it worked well.

Newzie itself is one of the better desktop aggregators out there.