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The Great Web-Based Feedreader Challenge
We live awash in ever multiplying streams of content, and it can be hard to manage a media-diet that's based on typing in urls and constantly reloading. That's equivalent to hunting and gathering, living off of whatever happens to catch your eye in the pantry. The skilled dieter plans meals and sets up their life so nutrition flows in with minimal effort. And so we have the dream of push instead of pull, using RSS/ATOM feeds. (Basically all blogs, including mine, include a link to a feed, in either the RSS or ATOM formats. You, the reader, are supposed to take this link and give it to your newsreader, and your newsreader will then know how to automatically collect the new posts from the blogs you've chosen. Thus instead of having to manually go to Gigaom's blog and reload every time you want some Vitamin G, or Jon Fortt's blog everytime you need a nice Utility Belt snack, all the pieces of your diet arrive in your newseader when they're ready. There's no question of forgetting to make sure you get your daily dose of, say, B2.)
Our E-in-C Josh has frequently exhorted us to set up a newsreader to keep track of all the blogs we read. He seems quite keen on them, and uses a desktop version. My boss Owen, on the other hand, curls up his mouth in the kind of resigned cringe with which medium-sized children greet mushy vegetables. He uses Newsgator to sync his desktop readers, but prefers reading them in browsers. Robin Sloan, the closer half of the dynamic duo behind Extremely Personalized Intake of Content*, has regaled me with the glories of Bloglines--how long it took him to set it up, how totally worthwhile the effort was, and how easy it is to make the overwhelming tides of posts just disappear. Bloglines is certainly the only newsreader I've seriously used, and it seems to be weakly dominant among my friends and colleagues. However, Matt Thompson, the other half of the EPIC dynamic duo, just posted that Google Reader might be stealing him away. Here at Business 2.0 we've been chattering up some buzz about French starter page Netvibes. And after Eric Schonfeld pointed it out, I keep hearing about Six Apart's new purchase Rojo.
A desktop reader doesn't really make sense for me. At work I use a company Mac, at home I use my old Dell laptop. I often end up on friend's computers. (I actually consume a not insignificant portion of my media diet on my Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PC, but I'm going to save that wrinkle for another test.) But what about the web based ones?
Nothing is useful if you're not going to use it, so the first step to evaluating a tool is figuring out what could stop you from using it. For me the biggest obstacle is getting enough of my media diet in a reader such that I don't get pulled back into the world of Firefox-clicking-and-reloading by the remainder. I anticipate that the next biggest obstacles will be the look and feel, link-clicking behavior, and ease of bookmarking and commenting. After surveying my colleagues and chat buddies, I'm going to test
Bloglines
Rojo
Netvibes
Google Reader
My Yahoo
Newwsgator Online (The free version.)
And in the next few days I'll comment on the nitty gritty of creating and moving these lists of feeds, and how well the individual readers work. But first some comments on why people don't read news readers.
The fact that our Art Director, Eric Siry, emailed me that he prefers to visit the sites in a browser tells you something. Owen is also the Charts editor. My J-school New Media Adviser and design connoisseur, Sreenath Sreenivasan, lives and breathes the phrase "media diet", but doesn't really use a reader. On his blog Wordpress's Matt Mullenweg says:
How do I feel about syndication? A long time ago Jeffrey Zeldman said something to this effect:There's often a lot of communication in the design and layout that an author originally envisioned their words and links with. The surfing and browsing element gets lost, and with it much of the serendipity that makes the web joyful. And getting your media diet pushed at you is, at its heart, an unappetizing and unsurprising exercise.Q: If you offered an RSS feed, I could read your stuff without visiting your site.
A: If you stored your groceries on the sidewalk, we could eat your food without sitting across the table from you.
I'm not going to force you to, but come sit at my table and we can have jolly good time.
The obvious pro is that information workers are busy and blog and newsreading is now often part of their job description, even when they aren't profesionnal media nuts. The less obvious pro is that a well-regulated media diet can be regarded as a civic duty. In discussing this Washington Post op-ed with my law-student friend Rishi, we ended up talking about the idea that the Constitution expects specialist-watch-dogs--journalists and special interest groups--to follow individual pieces of the great Republic and sound the alarm when something is amiss. With so many pieces to watch, it's quite possible that the best way for us to actually hear the alarms is to have our own, personal routines for regularly checking in on them.
*My acronym: the correct acronym for the postulated EPIC future is Evolving Personalized Information Construct.
Comments (4)
For me, the problem with something like Bloglines is that there's still a website you have to check (even if it's one instead of many). The problem with a desktop reader is that you're stuck on that particular computer and you're too far away from your browser for my taste.
I take a middle-of-the-road approach and use the RSS Ticker extension for firefox. When new posts are made, they scroll along the bottom of my browser. Hovering will get you a summary and clicking brings it up in the browser. I also use Google's browser synch extension so that the information is synchronized between my home and work computers. It works for me-- for what it's worth.
Posted on Oct-02-2006 | Link
I can't imagine using a non-web-based feed reader now. (On a side note, I'm hoping that with the addition of client-side storage in Firefox 2.0 we'll start to see more and more applications moving to a web-based deployment model).
Rojo's been my reader of choice for awhile now. I switched from Bloglines because I liked the social aspects of Rojo -- recommendations, rojo mojo, etc.
That being said, none of the features have really panned out the way I had hoped. I really just use rojo as a simple reader for the most part. In addition, Rojo just recently rolled out a major infrastructural change to their service and the forums are awash with bug reports. Rojo was practically unusable for me for over a week and it still remains a bit buggy. Bear this in mind as you're doing your testing -- you may see some quirks but hopefully they'll go away soon.
The company has done a good job of managing the fallout from the disaster, but the combination of Six Apart's intention to slow or stop development of Rojo along with what the service's new and longstanding "quirks" has given me the nudge I need to start looking around again.
Wouldn't it be great if you could see the articles your friends were reading/digging/marking and have them automatically added to a custom feed of stuff just you might like? Or similarly, i'd love it if there was a service that did some sort of content analysis on the articles you read to find others that you might be interested in.
I'll be watching this space closely to see what your testing uncovers!
Posted on Oct-03-2006 | Link
The Matt Mullenwag quote is totally how I feel about feeds: I think presentation does often add something to the content.
Thus, my personal usage pattern for feedreaders is that I basically use them to quickly check up on blogs that rarely update without going to each one separately. For blogs I visit often, I prefer seeing them in the context of their original layout.
Of course, if you read dozens of blogs every day, your usage pattern would be different. :)
Posted on Oct-03-2006 | Link
Recently posted to digg: http://digg.com/software/From_Bloglines_to_Google_Reader
Personally, my first few days with Google Reader have been really pleasant.
Posted on Oct-06-2006 | Link