Dave Winer Visits Mozilla
Dave Winer visited Mozilla yesterday to give a talk about RSS during the all hands meetings. I've been a reader of Dave's blog for awhile and was previously a Radio Userland user for a couple of years so it was good to meet him in person.
He outlined his views on the 'river of news' format of aggregating feeds that Radio Userland uses. This seems to be Dave's preferred way of dealing with RSS. The advantage of this approach is that the new news items appear at the top of the list so you can quickly scan the new information and discard the old if you don't have time. I don't think he was too impressed with the way Firefox handles RSS feeds with the 'live bookmarks' and the way things are handed off to external readers.
I briefly talked to Dave afterwards about the new Video and Audio elements that are being specified, and about the Video implementation in Firefox. This came up in the context of if it was possible to build a podcast player in a web browser. With the video/audio elements I think this is more than possible and could make for a great user experience - all in standards (or at least, draft standard) based HTML.
On his blog he wrote about following up on his ideas on integrating RSS and podcasting into the web browser. I'm interested in seeing what he has to say on this and how the new functionality we are implementing could help with this.
Categories: firefox
He outlined his views on the 'river of news' format of aggregating feeds that Radio Userland uses. This seems to be Dave's preferred way of dealing with RSS. The advantage of this approach is that the new news items appear at the top of the list so you can quickly scan the new information and discard the old if you don't have time. I don't think he was too impressed with the way Firefox handles RSS feeds with the 'live bookmarks' and the way things are handed off to external readers.
I briefly talked to Dave afterwards about the new Video and Audio elements that are being specified, and about the Video implementation in Firefox. This came up in the context of if it was possible to build a podcast player in a web browser. With the video/audio elements I think this is more than possible and could make for a great user experience - all in standards (or at least, draft standard) based HTML.
On his blog he wrote about following up on his ideas on integrating RSS and podcasting into the web browser. I'm interested in seeing what he has to say on this and how the new functionality we are implementing could help with this.
Categories: firefox
Labels: mozilla
posted by Chris Double at 9:01 AM
3 Comments:
"River of news" is pure horse manure. It's lazy design by a lazy coder: Dave Winer. Let me get real specific here.
Dave goes on and on about how great his new app nytimesriver.com is, it is the prototype for his River of News concept. It's designed for an iPhone, lightweight access to the NYTimes RSS feed. But it totally sucks precisely because of what Winer thinks is so great about the "river," it's an unsorted, uncategorized stream of every story coming off the NYTimes wire. Try it on an iPhone, or use a regular browser but with a tiny vertical window to simulate an iPhone window. Now scroll down. And down and down. Pick up a few stories here and there to read, then notice there are huge sections you find totally irrelevant, like loads of baseball scores or dozens of ballet and opera reviews. Then remember you have to scroll ALL the way back to the top on an iPhone to get the URL bar back, this can take a long, long time and a lot of finger scrolling on the iPhone screen.
Now look at this app:
http://app.getleaflets.com/nyt/
It's the exact same content from the NYTimes feed. But it actually uses the computer for what it's meant to be used for: presenting information in a useful GUI with categories to show us just the information we want, nothing we don't need. No endless scrolling to get what you want, just a few quick pokes, no endless river of irrelevant junk, you can skip reading the sections you don't want to read.
So don't be too worried that Dave isn't impressed with your work. The only way to impress Dave is to do exactly what he says, exactly the way he says it should be. Dave is irrelevant, to follow his suggestions would be professional suicide.
News aggregator layout is quite a personal issue - maybe there's some way of doing an aggregrator that allows the user to customise it to their hearts content. The emacs of aggregators. Or maybe that's a bad comparison ;-)
I like the river of news. Your interface is nice but I'm not a fan of that layout personally. But you are right that the river of news has a lot of stuff that wouldn't be of interest. How best to solve this?
For me I'd like items to be categorized or tagged - maybe broken down the way your example is. Then a river of news with all items and ways of quickly making certain tagged items to be removed or added.
Maybe the aggregator could learn over time what I don't like to read. I'd rather tell it though since I don't trust it!
Sometimes I want to read 'all mozilla blog posts'. Sometimes 'all programming language posts'. Or 'all pitcairn island news items'. What are your thoughts on that approach? The 'river of news you want at this time'.
I might not get any work done if I had this though. Especially if it had a 'digg spy' like interface to constantly update new stories based on that tag. I'd forever be in 'must.have.more.news' mode.
so I wrote a in browser rss video player ;)
check it out let me know what you think ;)
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