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.
Twingly Screensaver is an interesting visualisation of blogosphere activity. It renders a turning globe with blog activity spiking out from different parts of the world. It reminds me a bit of Mapped Up.
Traditional feed aggregators are still a lot more powerful for churning through news than this. But this kind of visualisation could be useful as an adjunct for trend watching. They should really allow you to keyword filter Twingly Screensaver.
(It requires Windows and OpenGL but works OK in Parallels.)
Google Reader has started reporting subscribers properly and the difference in feed stats is noticeable. Above are my stats from the past Monday. 105 subscribers with the biggest group coming from Firefox Live Bookmarks (excluding the Other group.)
Now the stats from yesterday:
Not a big jump in subscribers, just to 117, but Google Reader now has the majority (excluding Other.)
I will keep an eye on it over the next week as subscriber stats change quite a bit day by day. Feed stats are actually quite difficult to understand. For instance Google Reader hits my feed once and reports the total # of subscribers to FeedBurner. But Firefox Live Bookmarks is a bunch of individual Firefox browsers being fired up and hitting my feed one by one. I wonder how good FeedBurner is at leveling it all to report meaningful stats.
As for Google Reader’s jump it is not surprising. Google Reader has no competition.
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.
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.
