Scobleizer: The “river” versus “folder” RSS approach
Matt
· 3 years ago
I've just been sorting out all of my feeds.
I use Outlook 2007 Beta at the moment, which has a built in RSS aggregator. I really do think that Windows needs one itself. Not everyone will buy Vista and Office, that is for sure.
Outlook automatically creates folders for feeds, but I arrange mine into 'genres'. For example - blogs, technology, sport, etc.
If I didn't use Outlook, I'd be a bit stuck. I'd have to go for Onfolio or Google Desktop.
Aaron B. Hockley
· 3 years ago
To me I'd think time spent sorting feeds, and clicking on individual folders to read those feeds, seems like time wasted...
Brian Sullivan
· 3 years ago
I use intraVNews (which is I think a similar reader to NewsGator -- at least it is Outlook based).
I like you sort incoming news by weblog. But I also use Outlook folders to arrange it so that only new/unread entries are viewed (sorted by weblog) in a custom folder.
I think if I wanted to (I don't) I could arrange it so that the news was presented in a complete "River of News" type format -- can't NewsGator work the same way?
Dave Coustan
· 3 years ago
Hey Robert, how do the myEarthLink Reader/myFavorites tools compare to the other river-of-news readers you've tried?
While it's true we're aiming in part to broaden usage of Readers to more regular folk, we want to know what a feed omnivore like yourself thinks of it too.
John Stanforth
· 3 years ago
This is amusing, we're now having the same discussion in comments on Dave's site, John Robb's site, and Scoble's site... coincidentally, the old Userland team! :-) So yeah, to those who asked, it sounds like most of these readers (including FeedDemon, NNW, NewsGator, Bloglines, etc.) can be configured with something similar, but an auto-aging function that lets all items be auto-marked-read after 24 hours or something might give Dave the true River of News style he wants, while letting us use the per-post treatment for other feeds.
And yeah, Mike Arrington's getting good PR out of this since I coincidentally commented on Dave's site with almost exactly what Scoble's written here. :-)
Craig Barnes
· 3 years ago
This subject is directly on point for us at Attensa. Our 1.5 public beta of Attensa for Outlook is out and has a twist on "river of news" ...it predictively ranks based on your behavior. Early feedback is solid and it's worth a look. Aside from that it is very snappy in both loading and updating feeds compared to alternatives. Also syncs with Vista/IE7. Food for thought. This "riever of news" view is just the tip of the iceberg of what we are doing with Attention.
Sam Davyson
· 3 years ago
I am not sure which feed you have for posts just by Mike Arrington. If you mean TechCrunch at least half of post on there these days are by Marshall Kirkpatrick.
And I think that TechCrunch participation is falling.
Granville Barnett
· 3 years ago
I didn't think I would, but Outlook 2007 RSS reader I think is great, very fast - a lot better than Thunderbird n my opinion even though I use Thunderbird on my home computer.
And yes the mark all as read feature is pretty sweet as its annoying having a folder constantly old :(
kevinmarks
· 3 years ago
Robert, I mentioned this to Dave too, but have you looked at Technorati Favorites recently? It'll import your OPML and let you tag your favorite blogs so you can view or search a subset.
Michael Martine
· 3 years ago
I dig bloglines. I know it's ugly and has problems, but nothing else I've tried even comes close to meeting my needs: portability and with folders I can direct my attention where I want. I like that I can make the feeds public but have private ones, too.
Anthony Your
· 3 years ago
I also use Newsgator (outlook version). I like being able to switch between "river" vs. "folder" by using search folders. I create a search folder that display across all RSS folders or I can visit folders individually. I also create a search folder that hits the blogs that I read daily and excludes the ones I read less frequently. It just works.
Zoli Erdos
· 3 years ago
I don't like the river style in Outlook either, so the new Attensa release does not do anything for me (it may have fixed bugs though).
I do have a trick in Outlook though: I have folders by blogs (authors), but dont' read them directly: set up a search folder for "unread" in the Attensa file, and made this search folder a "favorite", and I keep the original Attensa folder collapsed
This way the favorite always shows the number of new feeds, they are sorted under Blog titles, and when I read somehting, it automatically disappears from the favorite (unread) listings, as if I deleted it. If I want to go back to an already read post, I just pull it up from the main Attensa folder.
Colin
· 3 years ago
The pure river of news thing, presupposes the feeds know what you want. I keep 5 or 6 topical but broad categories, (eg, research, daily, commentary etc) and use Greatnews to do a river of news within each. Greatnews works well because its super fast, and with one key, the spacebar, I can rapidly see everything. If you want pure river, Google Reader, which recently added folder reading too interestingly.
Kevin Burton
· 3 years ago
Yeah...... I've always been a big fan of the river of news which is why Rojo was/is a river of news (with folders) aggregator.
I still think its the best product out there but I'm obviously biased. What I find REALLY strange is why people still like bloglines. I think its the "it just works" philosophy which is very important to a lot of people. I'm starting to think this means more than feature set.
*What I was writing originally triggered such profound proprietary instincts in me that those waves caused FF1.5 to lock up hard and I had to abort. Not j/k!*
W=Q/V ... what something is worth depends on how much of it there is and how fast it's moving, did I recall my Economics 12?
Cognitive ergonomics: there's no way I'm going to put up with being pained repeatedly and frequently ... unless there's a payoff. (Cost/benefit, yes?) If each of a long series of teeny actions bothered us a teeny little bit then we'd prolly be really futzy and reactionary. *looks around* Yaa, like this.
Pleasure is Web2.0; elegant, responsive ... and intelligent.
I doubt that "rivers" and "folders" are actually orthogonal, strcitly speaking ... but dang near!
*It's paradigmatic, my dear Watson!*
Zack
· 3 years ago
I use Opera's reader, which lets me read my feeds either way. The RSS reader functions in the same fashion as the Opera e-mail client; namely, as a database. I can click on a feed's heading (which will be bold if there are unread items) to read its content, or use the 'Read Feeds' function to see a river-style view of all my unread messages. There's no need to me to ever sort anything; it's all automagic.
Matt
· 3 years ago
Have many people here tried Google Reader?
I found it a bit buggy for my liking, and the tags were, in my experience, useless.
Ron McCoy
· 3 years ago
I’ve been using SharpReader for a long time now and it lets me browse by feed, category or the full “river of news.” I don’t want to be restricted to just one mode and this aggregator handles all three.
Stephen Edgar
· 3 years ago
Don't forget that by using Outlook's search folders you can have a 'River of News' style format and at the same time still havint Mike's posts in his own folder for when you want to get to those individually if they are not part of the fresh news the folder stays marked as bold until you get to them or mark everything as read.
Michael Markman
· 3 years ago
On Mac, I use Dave Watanabe's NewsFire. You can have folders or not. Click a list of individual feeds. Or an aggregate of all items, sorted by data or feed. It's a river. It's folders. It's a cany mint. It's a floor wax. Oh, yeah... There's a window for text feeds. A window for podcats. But, sorry, Robert, you may not like it because it is beautiful. (as is all of Dave's stuff.)
Michael Markman
· 3 years ago
Oh, yes... and two more helpful features in NewsFire: "smart feeds," a folder that will gather items based on whatever criteria you set and search.
toivo
· 3 years ago
bloglines mobile is good. keep 5-10 blogs in a folder. a small river.
David Mercer
· 3 years ago
What I think is awesome about rss readers is that there are so many of them. There isn't the mono/duopoly like quickly formed with web browsers.
Stand alone aggregators, ones build into web browsers, ones running as web pages, weird hybrids of those forms, with different reading and presentation styles. That kind of diversity is great for users, and great for developers. MS and Netscape sucked almost all of the oxygen out of the browser market between them, and I'm very glad to see that that hasn't happened with rss aggregators so far.
Robert Sanzalone
· 3 years ago
Too many "techies" go "ehwwwww!" when it comes to getting their feeds in e-mail. I disagree. I've been using Squeet for the past 4 months and am hooked. The secret is not WHERE you get your feeds but WHEN and from WHOM. Squeet controls that. Newsgator doesn't as well.
Alan Kleymeyer
· 3 years ago
Why can't NewsGator be considered a River of News aggregator? I've never understood the debate between RON vs Folders. Depending on how you use them, NewsGator and any aggregator worth it's salt does both as I describe here
All Comments
I use Outlook 2007 Beta at the moment, which has a built in RSS aggregator. I really do think that Windows needs one itself. Not everyone will buy Vista and Office, that is for sure.
Outlook automatically creates folders for feeds, but I arrange mine into 'genres'. For example - blogs, technology, sport, etc.
If I didn't use Outlook, I'd be a bit stuck. I'd have to go for Onfolio or Google Desktop.
I like you sort incoming news by weblog. But I also use Outlook folders to arrange it so that only new/unread entries are viewed (sorted by weblog) in a custom folder.
I think if I wanted to (I don't) I could arrange it so that the news was presented in a complete "River of News" type format -- can't NewsGator work the same way?
While it's true we're aiming in part to broaden usage of Readers to more regular folk, we want to know what a feed omnivore like yourself thinks of it too.
And yeah, Mike Arrington's getting good PR out of this since I coincidentally commented on Dave's site with almost exactly what Scoble's written here. :-)
And I think that TechCrunch participation is falling.
And yes the mark all as read feature is pretty sweet as its annoying having a folder constantly old :(
It'll import your OPML and let you tag your favorite blogs so you can view or search a subset.
I do have a trick in Outlook though: I have folders by blogs (authors), but dont' read them directly: set up a search folder for "unread" in the Attensa file, and made this search folder a "favorite", and I keep the original Attensa folder collapsed
This way the favorite always shows the number of new feeds, they are sorted under Blog titles, and when I read somehting, it automatically disappears from the favorite (unread) listings, as if I deleted it. If I want to go back to an already read post, I just pull it up from the main Attensa folder.
I keep 5 or 6 topical but broad categories, (eg, research, daily, commentary etc) and use Greatnews to do a river of news within each. Greatnews works well because its super fast, and with one key, the spacebar, I can rapidly see everything.
If you want pure river, Google Reader, which recently added folder reading too interestingly.
I still think its the best product out there but I'm obviously biased. What I find REALLY strange is why people still like bloglines. I think its the "it just works" philosophy which is very important to a lot of people. I'm starting to think this means more than feature set.
Tailrank also has a river of news style view ...... you can also adjust how much data it will show simply changing the minimum ranking at the top of the page. Pretty cool :)
BTW.... I should note that all of this stuff has a RESTian API so RSS aggregator developers could add memettracking directly into their products if they wanted to.
Contact me if you want to talk about it... I haven't had a ton of time to writeup or document the API.
Kevin
W=Q/V ... what something is worth depends on how much of it there is and how fast it's moving, did I recall my Economics 12?
Cognitive ergonomics: there's no way I'm going to put up with being pained repeatedly and frequently ... unless there's a payoff. (Cost/benefit, yes?) If each of a long series of teeny actions bothered us a teeny little bit then we'd prolly be really futzy and reactionary. *looks around* Yaa, like this.
Pleasure is Web2.0; elegant, responsive ... and intelligent.
I doubt that "rivers" and "folders" are actually orthogonal, strcitly speaking ... but dang near!
*It's paradigmatic, my dear Watson!*
I found it a bit buggy for my liking, and the tags were, in my experience, useless.
Stand alone aggregators, ones build into web browsers, ones running as web pages, weird hybrids of those forms, with different reading and presentation styles. That kind of diversity is great for users, and great for developers. MS and Netscape sucked almost all of the oxygen out of the browser market between them, and I'm very glad to see that that hasn't happened with rss aggregators so far.