NotesTimeline algorithms should be useful for people, not for companies. Their quality should not be evaluated in terms of how much more time people spend on a platform, but rather in terms of how well they serve their users’ purposesFeedUnfurl
NotesHighlight:It’s just that feeds could be so much more with some love and directed care – something that could jump from a niche use case to a widespread ‘normal’ part of the Web for many.
Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores some ideas of how to start.FeedUnfurl
NotesWhat we need is a digital-media version of organic food or a local farmers’ market: ethically sourced, sustainably funded, and integrity-certified, all the way from CMS up. Unfurl
NotesAdded all 449 "Bundles" that Google Reader provides, plus their 27 "featured bundles" from famous people, and then added some top feeds that were the result of searches for a few keywords.FeedUnfurl
NotesIt might appear like gloom and doom (actually, if it doesn't, you're not looking), but really it's a massive opportunity. Again, anyone who uses a news reader can't imagine having to live without one, yet I see the feed ecosystem slowly deteriorating with no replacement in sight. That's the opportunity, in my mind. It's not about simply mimicking Google Reader (which I would never do anyways, as I've never liked it), but about bootstrapping off the system we have today, in order to create a new type of news reader for tomorrow. The future of news readers, so to speak. ;-)FeedUnfurl
NotesI’ve long privately thought that Firefox should treat feed reading as a first-class citizen of the open web, and integrate feed subscribing and reading more deeply into the browser (rather than the lame, useless live bookmarks.) The impending demise of Reader has finally forced me to spit out my thoughts on the issue. They’re less polished than I like when I blog these days, but here you go – may they inspire someone to resuscitate this important part of the open web.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesInteresting historical perspective on RSS & feed readers & usenet, and a kind of depressing prediction that we're going back to the days of magazine silos.Unfurl
NotesPushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.Unfurl
NotesWell, no, not really. Because in the past the user only had to decide whether to share something they just read, but now they have to think about every single article before they even read it. If I read this article, then everyone will know I read it, and do I really want people to know I read it?Unfurl
NotesJust as /Library is now hidden from an OS X Lion user, and just as the iOS platform is locked down and sandboxed, RSS is simply dropping off into the background. Content is being syndicated and aggregated just as before. Perhaps even more so than in the past. Virtually everyone with a Facebook, Google+, or Twitter account follows a news-providing entity. Those entities share content feeds. Those content feeds are generally derived from the XML and Atom feeds that comprise the RSS.EmbedUnfurl
NotesAs with any new technology developing in the open, RSS was constantly evolving, with competing flavors, and it was proving difficult to settle on one single standard. Until, that is, Dave approached Martin Nisenholtz about getting The New York Times content pulled into RSS.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes This is essential. There were several feeds that I subscribed to from individuals that were an absolutely vital part of my informational flow. Now, I no longer have access to those feeds. Instead, Google hopes that I'll watch those same people in Google+ to see what they share publicly. Only these were private feeds meant pretty much only for me. In the 36 hours or so that I've been using the new Reader, I've been unable to access these feeds or find alternatives that are as easy to use. Unfurl
NotesAnd that is exactly what’s bugging me about the death of Reader Share. It was an info pantry, not a colander—a place well stocked with nourishing brain food. I followed a number of people who had demonstrated, day after day, a sharp eye for items worth my time. Every time I clicked that “people you follow” link to see what they’d shared, I could count on learning something.EmbedUnfurl
NotesWe users had been warned for weeks that a redesign of the popular (and free) RSS reader was in the making, so the appearance of a new version didn’t come as a shock. The only shock was how terrible the new version is. It subverts users’ needs in favor of Google’s. The company wants to fight Facebook with a uniform interface for its free suite of services—which also includes Gmail, Calendar, and Docs—that will encourage sharing of content on its newish social-networking product, Google+. But in making the whole Google product line visually consistent, the company has crippled one of its best offerings.Unfurl
NotesBut for people who used Google Reader's sharing features, the upgrade is a big loss, for all intents and purposes ruining that aspect of Reader. The old sharing methods have been totally supplanted with Google+ tools, which, quality aside, are too different to satisfy the same needs. I'm going to dive into the nitty-gritty here, so consider yourself warned.FeedUnfurl
NotesEven before Google unveiled it's changes to Reader, it did not care what users thought. In the first blog post announcing the changes, Google said, "We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you." As a nice gesture, Google gave people tools for transferring their feeds and social data to other RSS aggregators, but the point was clear: You don't have to like what we're about to do. FeedUnfurl
Notes<blockquote>The shareable social object of subscribe-able items makes Reader’s network unique and the answer to why change is painful for many of its users is because no obvious alternative network exists with exactly that object. The social object of Google+ is…nearly anything and its diffuse model is harder to evaluate or appreciate. The value of a social network seems to map proportionally to the perceived value of its main object. (Examples: sharing best-of-web links on Metafilter or sharing hi-res photos on Flickr or sharing video art on Vimeo or sharing statuses on Twitter/Facebook or sharing questions on Quora.) If you want a community with stronger ties, provide more definition to your social object.</blockquote>FeedUnfurl
NotesYesterday, I got an email from a good friend with a subject line that needed no further explanation: "Google Reader." It was sent to a group of mutual friends, bemoaning the recent changes to Reader's interface, thereby kicking off a lengthy dis...Unfurl
NotesThis plugin adds PubSubHubbub ( PuSH ) support to your WordPress powered site. The main difference between this plugin and others is that it includes the hub features of PuSH, built right in. This means the updates will be sent directly from WordPress to your PuSH subscribers.EmbedUnfurl
Notes"The call to action is to build on the Lizard Feeder concept with anything from ideas to pixels to code. I hacked up a grease monkey script that weights the data-source checkbox & label on the left according to the volume of flow. This provides a bit of focus + context for the recent stream. The implementation is a minimal, bit-of-an-evening starter kit (MPL) for more interesting creations."Unfurl
Notes"In some ways this is slightly more elegant than the XMPP solution as neither side has to maintain a dedicated long-running process. ... There are a number of people on inexpensive service providers who have at best web scripting hosting and not much elseUnfurl
Notes"For the last few years or so, I've been fortunate enough to have my day job involve thinking critically about reading feeds. As a result, I've been musing about first principles."FeedUnfurl
Notes"What's Snackr? It's an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window. "Unfurl
Notes"Google Reader is ugly, but it works great as an online RSS newsreader. So what if I used Fluid.app to create a standalone Mac app and replace my desktop newsreader."Unfurl
Notes"Over the past couple of years, I eventually got to the point where I would have something like 200-odd feeds subscribed and yet only 60 or so new items a day – the magic resided in a companion script that did Bayesian classification of that veritable fFeedUnfurl
Notes"WP-o-Matic makes autoblogging a snap by automatically creating posts from the RSS/Atom feeds you choose, which are organized into campaigns."Unfurl
Notes"Imagine if Google made a more open social networking tool than Facebook all via RSS feeds? Stick that into your RSS feed reader and smoke it!"Unfurl
Notes"For Firefox 2, only the application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed, application/atom+xml, and application/rss+xml MIME types are supported. All values have the same effect, and the registered handler will receive feeds in all Atom and RSS versions."Unfurl
Notes"One of our problems was getting access to feeds. We could have created a proxy to feeds, but instead we used bloglines as the proxy, and got the data from there."EmbedUnfurl
Notes"With the AJAX Feed API, you can download any public Atom or RSS feed using only JavaScript, so you can easily mash up feeds with your content and other APIs"Unfurl
Notes"I like the idea of turning all the data on the web into my raw material, to do with what I please. That’s the beautiful part of Pipes. Still, the more data we deposit in the hive-mind of the web, the less power we have over it."Unfurl
FOSDEM 2025 - Build your own timeline algorithm
What RSS Needs
Carl Chenet / feed2toot · GitLab
Huge list of 3000 bundled feeds from Google Reader extracted by russb
A few thoughts about RSS news readers from someone who thinks about them way more than you probably do - Russell Beattie
Why feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it – Luis Villa
The purported death of RSS
This Mac OS-Themed Userstyle Transforms Google Reader into a Clean, Well-Spaced Reader
Martin Nisenholtz, RSS, and the power of standards » Nieman Journalism Lab
GeekMom » Blog Archive » Why Curated Content Matters: A Lament for Reader Share
Google Reader Backlash: A Fuss Over Nothing? - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic
Google Doesn't Seem to Want to Fix Reader - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic
Dreams, discernment, and Google Reader | massless
WordPress › PuSHPress « WordPress Plugins
Design Proposals
Visualizing Mozilla Community :: The Mozilla Blog
massless.org - Four Firsts for Feeds
Snackr: an RSS ticker for Windows/Mac/Linux built using Adobe AIR and Flex.
The Tao of Mac - An update on my RSS setup
Ajaxian » Google announces new AJAX Feed API