Posts about Dave Winer (RSS, JSON)

9AM — Feedland, a new type of feed reader, was released not too long ago by Dave Winer, the father of RSS. Feedland is different; it’s not just a simple reading tool but tries to integrate community features to discover new sources, like articles and share them using Radio3, a link-blogging tool also built by Winer. I’ve used Feedland for a couple of weeks and have mixed feelings overall. It doesn’t click with me.

Some excellent ideas are built into Feedland, which make for a wildly different experience compared to conventional feed readers:

• The news view, I believe Winer calls it the River, lists recent articles grouped by source in reverse-chronological order. It’s like a Twitter feed without the noise.
• There is no read/unread status for posts. Gone are the constant reminders that there’s another thing I need to read. If I don’t get to it today, I’ll probably never get to it. And that’s fine.
• I can see other people’s subscriptions. If I read something I like, I can see who subscribed to the same feed and what else they are reading. It’s a great way to explore new content without the algorithms of today’s silos, constantly shouting at you, “hey, look at this too.”
• It has an everyone’s-news page, listing all the items from all feeds that all Feedland users have subscribed to. Another way to find new content.

The positives are offset by a couple of awkward design decisions and an overall experience that feels unfinished.

• You need a Twitter account to sign up, which probably made Dave’s life much easier. Still, if you’re building a site focussing on openness and interoperability, you shouldn’t use one silo’s login mechanism that might even go out of business soon. (But then Winer was (is?) a Twitter shareholder, which shines a different light on the decision.)
• The user interface is clunky and slow, and most features are hidden away in drop-down menus on the top of the site, not where I’d expect them. I only learned that there are different views through one of Winer’s posts, but I needed a direct link at first to get to these views. Sometimes I would click on a link only to see an obscure error message like “Can’t display the Likes because the feed is not in the database.”
• Why is the feed list the default view, showing a list of all feeds you’ve subscribed to? You have to expand to a feed’s latest posts. Why is the default view not the “River,” listing all recent posts in reverse-chronological order?
• The special pages, everyone’s news and the hotlist, are mostly useless. While I like that I can explore what everyone on Feedland is reading, it’s mostly news sites and tidbits from Winer himself. The more interesting content that is from something other than the New York Times or the BBC, that content is hard to find.
• Feedland strips any markup from most feeds, including blockquotes, emphasis, and links. If want a link, I need to click through to the post on the website to get the whole experience. The only feeds in my timeline that aren’t affected are from Winer himself.

All in all, Feedland is not a useful product. I don’t need the likes, I won’t use Winer’s link-blogging tool, and the most valuable views are either littered with sources I want to see or require too much clicking around on the website to reach. I will stick with NewsNetWire to read the sources I follow and turn to blog directories to discover new stuff.