Posted on July 14, 2006 at 1:03 PM in @earthlink
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
Ok, so Reader.
(Note: if you have reviews or thoughts to add to the conversation in addition to writing comments below, odds are we'll see them but play it safe and add this trackback to your blog software.)
The letters RSS can bring anxiety (or blank stares) to many. Our goal with reader was to expose the idea of reading feeds instead of web sites to many more people than know about it today, and do it in a way that doesn't give anybody nightmares. At it's best, an experience with a feed reader should remove several steps in your quest to stay connected with your friends, colleagues, and the world around you. It should bring you information and entertaining content that you didn't know was out there. And it shouldn't bring on additional anxiety. It's an exciting space because it's still new and wide open. No one has yet defined the ideal RSS reading experience, and in fact one size may not fit all.
In a previous Earthling entry, Director of Web Applications Gregg Hartling looked at many of the readers out there and made the following observation:
Maybe there are some basic assumptions in news readers today that aren't requirements for people who aren't power users. I look at one row in particular in the TechCrunch matrix: Mark Feed Read/Unread. Every application reviewed has a check mark in that row. Even as a power user, I've always found the Read/Unread feature in news readers too closely mirrors my email application and is the source of a lot of information anxiety. A day away from my reader and I would have to spend time making sure the hundreds of items that had come in all reached a "Read" state. I began working for my news reader more than it worked for me. I don't cross off articles I read in the Los Angeles Times. Why should my news consumption be the same as my email?
Ours isn't revolutionary in what it brings to the table. In fact, Mr. RSS himself, Dave Winer, has rightfully pointed out that one of the compelling features in our Reader, the "recently updated" list, originated in the software he's built (and before that in actual newswires). When I spoke to Craig Forman, President of EarthLink's Value Added Services this morning, he agreed with Winer about the simple efficiency of a "scrolling waterfall" of news and information. He said it harkened back to his days as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, when he'd read news off of the wire services, with the latest popping up first, in chronological order. Craig said, "It just made it really easy to get a glimpse of what was new at any given time without having to keep up with whether or not you'd read everything yet." I guess that makes Craig a news "edge case" going back several career lifetimes.
As with myFavorites, our goal with Reader is to innovate through simplification and meaningful integration. Here's some of what the application does today, the bugs we know about and are working on, and more about what you can expect to see in the near future.
Today, you can:
- Keep up with the latest news and your favorite blogs, all in one place.
- Easily import and export your current feed subscriptions from an OPML file. Ignore this if you're not already an RSS nerd.
- Hold on to your favorite articles within Reader, e-mail them, or send them to myFavorites with tags and notes.
- View and update Reader from anywhere with a web browser and internet access.
- Add new sources from a browser with our browser button/bookmarklet.
Known issues. We're working on these:
- That's So Last Year: Your initial last login time is set to last year. That's not right. It should be yesterday so you get all articles from yesterday.
- Save Jump: When you save articles, you get sent to the top of the page. We need to put you back on the article you were looking at.
- Asking Twice: We're double-requesting to some sites for their content, which is bad form.
- OPML Ish: We're fixing error handling and notification here. Proper OPML imports work fine.
If you find any more, please comment or e-mail them to the Reader blog.
We're following the same iterative development process for Reader as we are for myFavorites. You won't see saved-up-but-rare big new versions, you'll see small changes rolling in on a regular basis. It's kind of like watching a person grow. Some of the things on our minds include deepening the integration with myFavorites, the front door of myEarthlink, and other myEarthLink applications, and making the interface simpler wherever possible. Let us know if you have additional ideas for us to consider.
Special thanks again to the developers, designers, engineers, QA people, product management, pm's, and systems folks who've been living and breathing Reader for the past few months, many of whom will continue to do so.
Oh, and a couple of quick customization suggestions from my personal use: I've found that I like the list of sources to be on the right and my news to be the first thing on the left, so I went to "settings" in the top right and chose "sources list - on the right". And I told it to open links in a new window, and set my browser to display new windows in tabs. That's a nice pizza pie.