Monday, August 18, 2003

Dave Wyner comments on a Wired article on news aggregators: There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you're done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio's aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something. [Scripting News] This classification leaves out NetNewsWire, which provides chrono order but also has the three-pane interface typical of mail readers. The Radio aggregator was a good jump-start, but the interface limitations of the browser make it slow and unwieldy if you aggregate more than a few feeds. NetNewsWire provides a much quicker way of surveying a large number of feeds and selecting articles to explore. And a good way to post too. 9:07:00 AM