Reinventing the interface

[firecat]

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2009/05/05/RSSReadersModeledAfterEmailClientsAreFundamentallyBroken.aspx

Looking back at the time I’ve spent working on RSS Bandit, I realize there are a couple of features I added to attempt to glom the river of news model on top of an email based model for reading feeds. These features include

* the ability to mark all items as read after navigating away from a feed. This allows you to skim the interesting headlines then not have to deal with the “guilt” of not reading the rest of the items in the feed.
* a reading pane inspired by Google Reader where unread items are presented in a single flow and marked as read as you scroll past each item

Gosh, that sounds just like Usenet.

Comments

[flarenut.livejournal.com]

I was with that article right until I saw the "like Facebook" description. No, almost exactly the opposite of facebook. I don't want all the replies to the things I found interesting to scroll three miles down the river while I'm having a life and only be accessible by opening yet another tab to some stupid URL that will fire off dozens more cpu-sucking pieces of javascript.

Yeah, reinventing threading and newsreaders would pretty much do it.

Of course the other thing is that if you know anything good will be flagged by some small number of the people you read, then you just don't read the rest...