DISQUS

Louis Gray · 3 months ago

Dave, you often talk about the importance of a River of News approach, and that this differs from Google Reader's offering. Specifically, you have said "I prefer a reader that finds the new stuff for me, and presents it in reverse chronologic order. This is known as a river of news reader." How much different is this from the "All items" view in Reader, which shows me the new stuff in reverse chronological order? There's no doubt their team has a huge respect for RSS and I bet they too would want to know how you believe they are not delivering what you need.

dave · 3 months ago

The river of news may run underground for some people, but it's still the way you get news.

littlescottie · 3 months ago

Maybe I'm just naive, but is he not just citing "mainstream" examples that are modeled after river of news readers? Facebook and Twitter have simply returned to the basic principles of the river of news and, by extension, serve as aggregators themselves to expand a person's news sources. He's marveling at the popular bright, shiny and newer model of the same technology.

mikepk · 3 months ago

Difference being that those "newer" examples are almost entirely walled gardens of only one kind of data. The true river of news should let me add sources from anywhere.

littlescottie · 3 months ago

Then I suppose something like FriendFeed–at least in its current form–is essentially a happier medium within the realm of supposed user-friendly social media platforms that allows a wider variety of source types, essentially breaking down the walls.

briancarnell · 3 months ago

Plain old Twitter is certainly a "river of news" system, but notice that people then almost immediately go out and write clients that people regularly use that let people get around the fail that is a straightforward river of news setup.

For example, in Tweetdeck, etc. we define groups, etc so that we can give priority to one set of users (say, work-related folks) compared to other set of users (say, sports-related folks). In fact some of us only follow one core group of Tweets on, say, Tweetdeck and read the rest in Google Reader.

Same thing with Google Reader. Currently I have about 500 feeds I'm subscribed too, categorized in about 15 different groups. Now do I care if I fall behind and don't read all the enertainment-related fields? No, not really. But my work and hobby-related stuff...absolutely..I read every single one of those.

Having a straightforward "river of news" that just combines everything was always a lousy idea which is why Google Reader is so popular and other RSS readers have fallen by the wayside.

If you want to just throw it all into one big "river" and drink from that, fine, but some users would like tools to narrow that down to drink a glass at a time based on context, keywords, etc.

mikepk · 3 months ago

A river of news does not presuppose that everything *must* be in one river. In fact, what works best in my experience is a set of context and topic specific rivers. The best analogy is to the different sections of a newspaper: sports, science/tech, world news, politics, etc... Of course it doesn't always have to be topic specific either. I used to have one river that was just for people that I wanted to read everything they had to say. Keeping the sources for that river small, it's flow rate was diminished and I could read everything that went by.

littlescottie · 3 months ago

I don't know that a river of news setup is a fail, it just places greater responsibility on the person consuming the news. So many clients take that burden off of the user. But why? Too few people are selective enough. They amass too many friends, follow too many people and subscribe to too many feeds. It's overkill in the same way that cable news is overkill. So many items are characterized as news that fewer and fewer people even recognize what news is anymore. I once had a college course on rhetoric, politics and mass media. The professor asked the class what "news" means. Only one person in the class defined it as the plural of "new."

People show too much sensitivity and too little selectivity. Let's be a bit discriminative when it comes to the information we really care to know. That's what news is all about. Sure, you can browse through dozens of sites to find a few tidbits that appeal to you. Or you can know what appeals to you and where to get it, and subscribe to those feeds.

The river of news is a fail only to those who are all too willing to subscribe to superfluous sources. Besides, a good news source will point you to other outlets if they don't have the whole story.

Mason Lee · 3 months ago

"Most are at odds with that with which they most constantly associate -- the account which governs the universe -- and what they meet with every day seems foreign to them." --Heraclitus (DK B72)

F. Andy Seidl · 3 months ago

Sam's post prompted me to respond, too. I get the sense that, sometimes, it just makes for attention grabbing headlines more than it makes sense. I wrote about that here:
http://faseidl.com/public/item/238401

smilbandit · 3 months ago

2. or maybe a feed that finds the new stuff for you.
5. as a news junkie and a rss reader coder I totally agree. and remove the articles I didn't bother reading after a certain customizable age.

Jesse Stay · 3 months ago

Well said, Dave! It drives me nuts when news writers and bloggers don't even bother to get their terms right! RSS isn't going anywhere - what they need to be arguing for is a better way to present the information contained in RSS. RSS is "the pulse of the planet", and nothing's going to replace it any time soon. :-) My preferences is that news people forget the word "RSS", RSS Readers stop calling themselves "RSS Readers", and instead it becomes something that just runs in the background without the end user even needing to know what it is. Us developers will smile, but no one else should ever need to know the software they're using is powered by RSS.

mikepk · 3 months ago

Agreed on all points, Dave. I don't think 'regular' users should even be talking about "RSS". They don't care about the technology, the transport, or the medium they care about getting *the news*, when they want it, how they want it. One of my new projects, now that I'm on my own, will be to potentially address this (again :) ). As a fellow news junkie, I've agreed with you for a long time that rivers of news are the way to look at news, I think it will happen it's just going to take the right presentation (and timing).

David · 3 months ago

Apparently I use RSS differently than everyone else. I don't want to visit over a hundred websites each day to read what's up. I use Google Reader as a way to avoid opening all those windows. I would find an RSS reader that didn't keep track of what I've read as no use at all. I comprehensively read. I'm just not looking for the "latest" article on "X-product" I want to read every article (or at least skim titles and snippits) from PEOPLE I value.

I've always been a believer that the real value of the internet is in people, not posts. Random posts from thousands of who-knows-what's is of zero value. What Dave Winer has to say today is very valuable to me. I don't care what you're talking about, I care that YOU are talking about it. LazyFeed for someone like me is only valuable for finding new PEOPLE to add to my RSS reader. I'd never use a product like that daily.

John Wright · 3 months ago

I was thinking about this last night and I agree with the point that RSS readers got it wrong. It's about what's new, that's the main thing.

My thought last night was this... RSS hasn't failed, RSS is all over the place but RSS is Really Simple SYNDICATION. It's easy for a website to publish an RSS feed. What RSS is not is Really Simple CONSUMPTION and that's where I think the "fail" is. RSS readers that I've seen are too complicated treating articles like email. They show me how many things I haven't read and they almost seem to expect me to read it all.

That's why I built my own RSS reader designed to just show me a page full of what's new, and I can manually scan the headlines to see what catches my attention to read. A lot of extra features would be nice but my focus was on being able to view what's new and add new sources to my page quickly and easily.

Joshua Hoover · 3 months ago

Dave, Well said. One small note on #2. Google Reader does allow you to have a river of news view. It's not the default but you can use it. River of news is my primary view in Google Reader. All the latest items (from all my feeds) show up first and I can scroll down to see the latest items. I don't think most people use Google Reader this way though.

Harrison Powers · 3 months ago

Joshua, how does one set this preference in Google Reader? I see sort options for newest, oldest, and auto.

I feel as though the 'all items' page, sorted by newest works as a River of News. shortcut to refresh is r

Joshua Hoover · 3 months ago

Harrison, I set mine to sort by newest, show expanded, and start on showing all items. I also have it set to mark items as read when i scroll ("n") through them.

yeasty123 · 3 months ago

I have used Google Reader as a river of news reader since it first came out. I just use the 'All Items' view with the view settings set to 'sort by newest'. Then I use 'j' to go forward item by item and 'k' if I want to go back up to something. It puts all of my feeds on a single page sorted by time with the newest items at the top.

dave · 3 months ago

Close but no cigar. A river of news is just a flat list of stories that you scroll through with the scroll bar. All the extra steps makes it *like* a river of news.

yeasty123 · 3 months ago

You can scroll through it with the scroll bar/mouse wheel/down arrow and it will mark the articles read as you go past them -- the 'j' thing is just the way I do it so I don't have to take my fingers off the keyboard.

Rod · 3 months ago

Hi Dave, I've been a Radio user since it was released and had been reading the web in Radio's river of news for a long time. I now use Google Reader and I'm confused as to what all the extra steps are. Once I set up Google Reader as the other commenters have described it is the same river of news view I had with Radio Userland. Maybe I'm forgetting something and need to load Radio again and see what I'm missing.

Is there any news on the possibility of an Intel build of Frontier? I've tried a few times to build it with Xcode but was never able to get it to build and run.

Aron Atkins · 3 months ago

Dave, It is possible to configure Google Reader in a "River of News" format.

1. Suppress the subscription management interface.
Settings->Preferences->Navigation pane display

2. Set the start page to the "all items" view.
Settings->Preferences->Start Page (choose "all items").

3. Set the sort order to "sort by oldest."
On the "all items" page, click the "View settings" button and choose "sort by oldest."

At this point, Google Reader shows a flat list of stories with a scroll bar on the right. This isn't quite the same as a single static HTML page because the top-level navigation controls are still there. This is a reasonable compromise, IMO.

There are binds to look at next/previous. The "j/k" bindings (mentioned above) work, but I remember "n/p" easier. You don't need to use the keybindings, but I like avoiding mousing where possible. You can also use paging controls or the scrollbar.

I really like the "star" feature so I can flag something for later re-reading. This is useful when I see something at work I want to read at home or vice versa. The "star" feature is portable bookmarking for feed entries.

I moved away from rawdog (a Python river-of-news HTML generator) to Google Reader and have been pretty happy.

Abhishek · 3 months ago

In my opinion RSS is the "Thread that weaves the web".
Rejecting RSS is like rejecting HTTP, as it has become such a backbone technology.

I agree, that most people don't like the application layer (GReader, Netvibes etc). There is lot of room for innovation there.
The critical innovation needed is to figure out how to filter through the data and deliver the right amount and relevant data to the user.

Diego Sana · 3 months ago

Agreed with everything :)

By the way, this post is not showing up in your rss feed. Just discovered it on Twitter :D

lPub · 3 months ago

Hmmmm. Can't tell if this is some sort of ironic intentional bug or not. But NetNewsWire is not grabbing this article off of the feed... As if to say, this is what happens when RSS breaks down...

I went and read the Diaz article. All I have to add to your incisive response is from google definitions http://bit.ly/ImvSD --

Definitions of dilettante on the Web:
1. dabbler: an amateur who engages in an activity without serious intentions and who pretends to have knowledge
2. showing frivolous or superficial interest; amateurish; "his dilettantish efforts at painting"

Anyone who claims to be a tech writer, and writing a blog on zdnet suggests as much, ought to know the difference between RSS and google reader.
His description of navigating around yahoo and google news, while managing a large bookmark collection, makes me shudder and appreciate exactly why I use RSS. How is that easier and more cutting edge?

Jim Edlin · 3 months ago

Re. point #2 - I guess there are other ways to use Google Reader, but the way I have always used it (showing new items from all items, sort by newest first) does in fact provide a reverse chronological order "river of news" as I understand that term. I've always strongly preferred this model myself, and settled on Google Reader after sampling other RSS reading tools *because* it provides this option. Not sure what you mean by "you have to find the new stuff" with Reader - I don't do anything but open it and read what looks interesting. (Oops - just saw Louis Gray and others already said pretty much the same and you already responded. Guess if this isn't the default setup it misses the mark by your standards. I set it up so long ago I didn't remember it wasn't the default.)

patrickdarling · 3 months ago

I have to agree that RSS is the way of choice for disseminating news content to both our traditional audiences as well as to audiences we never even knew we had. We've enjoyed major successes at our company using RSS as a tool in the PR toolbox for communicating our corporate messaging and overall story.

ryantate · 3 months ago

I have to agree with everyone saying Google Reader already does this. It does river really well, actually, and I'm a pretty hard core RSS user. "All Items" is basically the default view and it's a river. Click on any folder (where feeds are kept in reader) and you get a river view. To get a feed-by-feed view is actually the _harder_ thing to do -- you have to open the folders to see the individual feeds, and then click on one to see that feed.

It does depart from your philosophy in tracking "unread" items but it's very much a river.

That said, it has some major problems, foremost among them freshness of feeds and OPML (can't read live OPML, import dumps everything into one place, etc). And the interface could definitely use a major simplification (not to get at the River but w/r/t things like sharing/starring/favoriting, adding/removing feeds),

That said of course it's stilly to say RSS is dead or dying.

yigalc · 3 months ago

The ability to concentrate all sources through RSS feeding into one place (In my case, Google Reader) up-lift my ability to learn and share knowledge, effectively. More than that, the fact that i can look for issues I am interested in, and get updates from all over the web (thorough integrate tools like BlogSearch, Twitter Search, BackType, etc - with Google Reader) is remarkable.

William Mougayar · 3 months ago

Dave, I can't add a cent to your points. Misinformed people are throwing the baby (RSS) with the bath water (Readers).
There is another misleading post pegging RSS as "old fashioned" that Mark Cuban is making while he's trumpeting PubHubSubbub..It must be rebutted as well- http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/25/the-internet...
The last 3 days on this topic can be captured here: http://portal.eqentia.com/newsfuture/connection... (via RSS semantic aggregation)
And the river of news on the future of news http://portal.eqentia.com/newsfuture (an RSS-based app)

StareClipsDOTcom · 3 months ago

I agree, though I'm not sure exactly when your comparing Google Reader to what you'd prefer and when you are speaking in general. For instance, you stated:

"You have to go find the new stuff in Google Reader. I prefer a reader that finds the new stuff for me, and presents it in reverse chronologic order."

If you want news to come to you, just subscribe to the feed at Google News. Google Reader is an independent reading tool to read the things you want, not something to force news down your throat. Google News is a source to collect news and shove it down your throat. ;)

What confused me is you included the phrase "and presents it in reverse chronological order." When I read this, it sounded as though you were implying that Google Reader does not display things in reverse chronological order. It does. You can configure it to sort items in chronological order or reverse chronological order.

In my opinion (though it may not have been intended this way), RSS feed readers replace the idea of subscribing to posts via email. Before RSS, if I wanted to get regular updates from a particular source, I had to subscribe by giving out my email address. Eventually, when several places had my email address, I started getting spam. Spam was really hard to turn off and difficult to filter. Gmail has come a long way, but some still slip through the cracks. RSS saves the day.

I can subscribe to whatever feed I want... if one gets spammy, I just unsubscribe to it. With an RSS feed reader (such as Google Reader), I don't get spam that I didn't ask for. I don't have an "address" that people can pass around and bombard. Whatever I get will be through the syndication channels I specifically chose. This is why, in some cases, read/unread counts make sense. Maybe you want generalized news to read on any given day. I, on the other hand, want very specialized news. I can get my general news from places like Google News. However, if I don't want to visit Twitter and Facebook and fifteen different blogs which specialize in the kind of news I really want to hear about, I can just subscribe to each RSS feed and get it all in my RSS feed reader (in this case, Google Reader.) For these cases, I choose to read them in chronological order because I read every day. If a conversation takes place on Twitter or Facebook, I want to read it in the order it happened, not in reverse. If I only read news once a week, I would certainly sort it newest first, then would read backwards until I was bored of reading. Since I read every day, I read (or skim past) every post in chronological order until I have read everything, which makes read/unread status necessary.

If you don't like the read/unread concept, just ignore it. In Google Reader, you can hide the left nav panel and never have to worry about the unread counts. You can have it automatically start up in the items to read, and you can sort it by newest first. There's your "river of news" right there in Google Reader. Maybe I read your message wrong... maybe you weren't suggesting that Google Reader does not have these features.

By the way, it may be worth noting that I came across your post in Google Reader. Google has a special RSS feed called "cool"via Recommendations. It is a general list of general news deemed worthy of publications by the Google gods. The feed is here if you are interested:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/1...

daxl70 · 3 months ago

I use google reader, you can set it to only show new items (the already read are taken out), and also you can make the subscription show old items first.

merrymary2 · 3 months ago

Amen, Mr. Winer!

Accuracy and investigation is still king. As Charlene Li said to Lee Odden way back n the day - as Groundswell was being released..
.Lee:If you could be a social technology, which would you be?

Charlene: RSS/XML. Nobody would know who I am or what my initials mean, but I make everything work together. I’d be the foundation of mashups, social applications, and widgets. Without me, the social Web would grind to a halt.

Thanks for your clarity in this discussion - people have the advantage of RSS at every turn as it is the blood vessels of the internet.

orajean · 3 months ago

Bravo, Mr. Winer!
We are a TRSS SaaS company and are taking RSS to the next level.

Our new shopping portal www.ShoppeSimple.net <http://www.ShoppeSimple.net>  is launching in 33 days.  ShoppeSimple is the first of its kind:  a feed prospecting opportunity that enables consumers to pre-select themselves into offers from merchants they want to hear from and do business with.  There are no implementation fees with our service, no IT involvement.  We only get paid if we send new customers to our customers.

Kindly,
Ora DeMorrow
Business Development
RSSCheck / ShoppeSimple

Tom · 1 month ago

Couldn't agree more. It'll be interesting to see new formats of standardised information delivery emerge in the future to work alongside and possibly even enhance what we can already do with rss.