Dave’s drawing analogies between Google News Reader and ? (one supposes Radio) being compariable as to Lotus Jazz (yuk) compared to the forerunner – VisiCalc. Boy do these names draw some memories back from the dungeon.
Anyone remember Framework? Text based ‘windows’ multifunction software, and surprisingly useful as I recall.
Excel (and Word) certainly did pave the way for Windows use, but even Wordstar or MS Word for DOS were very functional. I was never much of a 1–2-3 fan – my personal favorite was SuperCalc, which I first discovered on CPM. That OS was a brief fling, not a love affair, terminated once I had a smokin’ 5 megabyte hard drive (yes 5 megabyte!) in an early IBM PC running MS DOS. SuperCalc for many years was a better spreadsheet, building on VisiCalc and taking it a step further. Unfortunately, Lotus were better marketers. Fortunately, SuperCalc was available on DOS at the time too.
Noo much later I ended up working for Computer Associates, who completed the circle by buying Sorcim (VisiCalc’s maker), along with Basic Software Group (ACCPAC) and in later days Nantucket (Clipper) and all sorts of other tools that I had first used as a user (internally within CA), later as functioning cog of the massive acquiring machine of CA.
Now its 25+ years later… where did the time go? My fingers ache, thinking about how many pc (and only briefly a mac), mainframe, vaxen and unix driven keyboards I’ve typed on over the years.
Google released a news reader that supports both RSS and Atom. Reaction is biased in some quarters:
[Scripting News] Google’s news reader is an awkward slow, hard to use piece of software, like all news readers. Nicely done though, as if that matters. I’m afraid most people will think This is RSS? and give up on it. They really need to check out River of News. Download a copy of Radio, the 30-day trial is free (as if Google couldn’t afford the $39) and just try it out already. No patents. Steal from the best, it’s respectful.Dave Winer
I agree with Dave that a long stream of articles, either in full form or snippets, is a very efficient way of keeping up with news. There are plenty of examples out there of this, not just Radio though… Rawdog is what I use; the various ‘planet’ feeds (planet python) follow this style as well.
Its likely Google knows how to add this functionality… after all, just spitting out everything is the simplest functionality to deliver:
[for newsitem in newsitems output_html(newsitem)]
…so one can only assume they either a) don’t use it themselves and thus aren’t clued in (unlikely), or b) have business reasons for not spitting out everything in a users feed stream (more likely).
The simplest reason I can think of is that an unpaged, full feed, stream of RSS-aggregator-driven HTML will be… big! Mine is 287k at present, varies up and down from there.
Contrast that to what Google serves up as their core business offering, a search result page—these tend to run around 4 – 6K per page.
Did Google pass on the River of News functionality because they are inept programmers? Clearly not. Bad designers? Possible, but not likely.
To get to the answer, we have to first look at what motivates them to offer the functionality, for free, in the first place. Clearly its the value of the data lying within user subscriptions to RSS; this rich web gives them more insight as to the interconnectedness of the web – what and who is hot and where – and thus can allow them to refine their core product, the index, further. That’s the prime mission—delivering the best index in the world.
They don’t need to offer the worlds best feed aggregator to gain that benefit from their users, just a useful one, and one that doesn’t break the bank in the process.
Could there be a valid business reason for not dishing out 200 – 500K per page refresh, to millions if not hundreds of millions of potential users, for free?
I think so.