Tech Goes Boom

More on Feedreaders

As David Wantanabe pointed out in the comments, Newsfire is still very early in it's release cycle, and he plans on implementing features like grouping and smart feeds in the future. I look forward to seeing it.

Here's another article that's a lot like mine that I ended up finding in the forums David runs. Covers most of the points I did and has some interesting comments attached to it.

I find it interesting to see the divide between users who want plain jane readers, and those who want something more advanced. I come from the Google school of thought on this one, as does our ponyboy at Glassdog. Collect a ton of information, more than you ever think you'll need, and then parse it for things that match your interest. Even if I have 500 questionable data sources pumping out 1 million questionable articles, I don't want to miss that one article that is vitally important to the work I'm doing.

Others would just rather maintain a small list of feeds and parse them manually, keeping a mental record of what feeds are consistently worth reading, and unsubbing from the ones that aren't. Unfortunately, this prevents them from catching that one quality article in the thousands. Computers are good at finding the needle in the haystack, humans aren't.

What if what is important to me changes? Or I get a wild hair? Persistent data storage and search come to the rescue and the more data I have to search, the more feeds I have subscribed to, the more info I have to search. The number and type of feeds I am subscribed to becomes transparent and the information in those feeds is brought to the forefront.

Where desktops are headed with Spotlight in Mac OS X and Longhorn's search capability is towards data abstraction. The Desktop metaphor, while still useful to a certain degree, is quickly falling to the wayside in the face of fast accurate searching capabilities. Anyone who has used Quicksilver or Launchbar on the Mac knows what I'm talking about. I hardly ever use the finder any more. Don't make me come to the data, make the data come to me.