I love my aggregator more than my browser.
One thing I’m finding really annoying is the existence of sites with no RSS feeds. On personal and/or largely static sites, that’s forgiveable, but on sites where the bulk of information is dynamic or frequently updated? Especially if the site is blog-esque? It’s seriously irritating. Ignoring RSS feeds is ridiculously antiquated and is going to start costing serious readership.
Speaking of RSS (or Atom), I note Google has just jumped on the bandwagon with Google Reader, news aggregation for the masses. I have some issues with this – like the fact that the Tour doesn’t even mention that it’s an aggregator. I understand the idea of not wanting to scare the layperson, and I can understand that Google may have wanted to avoid mentioning the specific technology so as not to validate their competition, but really. All they had to do was say something like “Google Reader subscriptions are powered by syndicated feeds, so every time you see an RSS or Atom link on one of your favourite news sites, you can read that news feed through Google Reader!” and that neatly turns a threat into an opportunity, to use modern business parlance.
One thing where I think Google dropped the ball? Google Talk is all wrong. Sure, it’s nice that it’s Jabber-compliant, but really – who needs yet another IM account (and, in the case of Windows users, probably another IM client)? I think the thrust of Google Talk’s efforts should have been in making a web-based IM client (plus allowing standalone client access for those as want to, of course). That’s where Gmail’s strength lies – it’s not that it’s another free email service, it’s that it’s got a really good fast web interface. If that had been the Cool Thing about Google Talk, it would have been much more exciting – and successful. As it is now, is anyone even using Google Talk much?
Technorati Tags: rss, blogging, aggregators, syndication, google, google+talk
October 8th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
I’ve been trying to like the google reader, but it’s a pain in the butt at the moment. You open it up to see a huge long list of all of your unread items. It’s unorganised, so you try and view it by label, but the problem is, it doesn’t tell you which labels have unread items and which ones don’t, so you have to go through them all manually, which is a pain.
I do like the fact that unlike bloglines, it treats each article individually rather than displaying an entire feed as a single item
October 15th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
Absolutely, non-RSS’d sites are a royal pain in the rear. I simply don’t bother reading a site now that doesn’t have some method of syndication, it’s just not worth the extra time and effort. Wait, I lie, there is one site I check manually because it’s too funny to miss – http://www.threadbared.com/
I think the only bookmarks I even use these days are my forums, everything else is del.icio.us’ed or syndicated :)
October 16th, 2005 at 2:27 am
I have a “daily reads” folder, which has a bunch of non-RSS webcomics and a couple of non-RSS blogs. Safari has an ‘open in tabs’ feature, so once a day I open a new window and just hit the ‘open in tabs’ link for that folder and it opens them all at once. That’s good enough for webcomics. :)