Yesterday I wondered aloud why RSS readers look like email clients.
@brentsimmons replied. Turns out he borrowed that layout for NetNewsWire in 2002 — and twenty years later, he's asking why no one's tried something different.
That conversation became an essay. I built a visual version (with an ASCII fallback).
I had to check, but I must have disabled the NNW badge when the open source version was published years ago. Maybe because of this.
Still, books have bookmarks. If I use it as a library, the feed counts tell me what page I’m on.
@tg @brentsimmons These days my RSS unread count is fluctuating between 980 and 1100 😳 At this moment, my email unread is 998. BTW, a large percentage of my email is “phantom” obligation. In fact, probably 90% of it.
Oh, hi Brent. Here’s some more phantom obligation for you.
thanks chuck. it's amazing to me someone could say something like that but that's where we are, a time when people just believe there's nothing new.
https://feedland.com/ is the place to start.
of if you want to get a quick look at what it's like using it.
that's the collection of feeds i follow.
help us get the word out.
@mayo @cagrimmett @tg @brentsimmons
could you post a screen shot of what you're looking at? i have a feeling you're describing a different product. ;-)
@tg @brentsimmons I built a feed reader called Stream that gives you a river of news view. That’s it. No list of blogs. Just a stream of news with a detail view when you select a row. It’s iOS only at the moment but it is coming for Mac.
@tg love this essay (including the presentation)!
As a lover of RSS to acquire and consume news, I’m definitely interested in what you are looking to build.
I’ve been a Reeder app user for years and love the clean styling. It does seem as though @rizzi may have had similar ideas as his redesigned Reeder. omits most feed counts and even includes options to hide the single count of newer items above your position in the timeline.
@tg @brentsimmons brilliant essay!
This hits very hard: "The red dot on a game has the same visual weight as a text from your kid."
Yes! I've also been mystified for years.
In 2012 I built an RSS reader that had flowers (daisies) where the number of petals told me about freshness of a site, and allowed me to visually browse and scroll around. The app fell into disrepair, and I've been meaning to vibe code something back to life for ages.
Suffice it to say, I'd love to try out what you are building :)
@tg @fj @brentsimmons I see the issue with this (Dave Winer has been talking about it for years), but I think part of the problem with RSS readers is that some things are less “phantom” than others.
There are a lot of things in my feed reader that are essentially evergreen. I could read it in a year and appreciate it just as much.
Some posts, honestly, I could never read at all and be fine (enough of those in a row, though, and I'll probably unsubscribe from the feed).
@tg @fj @brentsimmons Other posts, though… I really do want it to have a badge (or some sort of indication that this is hot shit I should get to). Maybe it's topical in a way that won't matter in two days, let alone a week. Maybe it's from a writer whose work I love and would hate to miss out on.
A feed reader that effectively manages this kind of use case heterogeneity would be most impressive, but IMHO none of the metaphors you provided really do that any better than what NNW does now.
@tg @brentsimmons thank you for the post. Your observations are spot on. I recall a friend asking me years ago is I ever tried to "pick up from where I was in a twitter thread". I told him, no, because, I have no memory of what I last read on twitter and so no point searching for it and might as well just continue from what i was seeing.
Right now, I see here on mastodon, that I have 72 posts to read. Should I? I usually don't get to them. Tough choices with guilt thrown in.
@tg that was a very delightful essay, the visual version really gave it a nice (and surprisingly relaxing) touch
if you still need someone to try out what you're working on, i'd be more than happy to give it a shot :)
@tg Great essay! Following to see what you might come up with.
I tried Tapestry and the new Reeder but they didn’t work for me. It felt like they made everything too transient, and I worried about missing something I really wanted to read. I think my ideal solution would have a way to distinguish between feeds where every post is meaningful (personal blogs) and feeds that I just want to sample periodically (news).
@tg I’m using ReadKit now and I like it’s time-based smart folders. I have ones for “Today”, “This Week”, and “Vintage” (older than two weeks, but probably should be even older than that). It’s a coarse tool, but it helps me skim newer stuff and cull older posts more effectively.
Being able to set expiry rules on a feed-by-feed basis might help with treating some feeds as transient and others as more precious.
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