myEarthLink Reader is getting attention among the tech savvy crowd today [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and we're delighted and humbled that Dave Winer, the blogging & RSS pioneer and evangelist, has called Reader an important product. You should read Dave's post, because he nails the idea behind our approach:
Your software should [...] find the new stuff since the last time you looked and show you that first.
Dave has been espousing the benefits of his "River of News" concept for years, and I'll readily credit his views as having influenced the direction of myEarthLink Reader. I also wouldn't dream of saying ours is the first or only news reader to take this approach (in 2006, that would be very foolish). Dave's software over the years, from Radio UserLand to his current NewsRiver aggregator, has implemented this approach.
Without getting into the debate over whether there is a best way to read aggregated news, we feel there is an opportunity to provide a simplified experience for our customer base. During prototyping, some of us skeptics of the "river" approach found it a more comfortable way to read, even for the techies among us. Eventually we stopped using our Bloglines or NetNewsWire applications completely.
I'd like to respond to Dave's UI critique:
The user interface is not optimal. Make the page much longer and the text smaller. You’re not taking advantage of a key capability of the human brain, it scans very quickly as you scroll. I want all the new stories in an hour to fit on one page. Depend on the vertical scrollbar, and tighten up the display of each news item.
The headlines are set in a larger font to assist with scanning as you scroll down the page. The larger font helps the eye easily pick out the headlines. This tested well in our usability studies.
We'll be looking at ways to intelligently decide how much to put on your page. While Dave wants all new stories in the last hour, we have users that don't sit at a computer all day. They come home, log on to their EarthLink dial-up connection, and check their 5 feeds. If we showed them only new stories in the last hour, they'd see a blank page. Instead, we want to show them new articles since their last visit.
And I don’t need the list of feeds I subscribe to on the same page as the news. Reclaim the space, just link to the list of feeds. Cut the cord with the mail reader approach, it’s wrong, have the courage to go all the way, you won’t be sorry.
We're not a half-way mail reader. We're a river with tributaries.
What you see in the sidebar under Recently Updated is a list of only your sources that have updated since your last visit (and an article count). Think of it as a bird's eye view of your river of news. This accommodates the many users who, like Scoble, want to just read what Mike has to say on TechCrunch. At a glance you can see whether you're interested in any of the feeds that have updated since your last visit. No scrolling necessary!
We've added freshness indicators to Your Sources. In the sidebar on your Reader page, there's an item called Your Sources that you can click to expand and see an alphabetical list of every source you're tracking. What you previously couldn't see was when each of these had updated.
Safari: 
Today, we're going to talk about Recently Updated.