To be honest, I think the ‘reading list’ feature that Dave is talking about is a pretty neat idea. I’m not sure I know of many practical uses for it, but it seems neat anyhow.
I’m not going to pretend I understand why he thinks he needs to write a whole new aggregator to get that feature out there… but it seems like he’s just wanting to flex his developer muscle a little bit. Earn himself a little more street-cred that he didn’t pick up when the OPML editor was, largely, a bust.
I’m also a little unclear on the difference between Dave’s “River of News” concept (a metaphor that he simply insists on shoving down our collective throats) and what, say, NewsGator (online edition) does if you click on the “My Feeds” folder… maybe the only difference is that NewsGator doesn’t call it “River of News”, and we all know how Dave likes things to be called as he calls them.
What is the reading list all about? A way of grouping and sharing groups and changes to groups of rss feeds? Yeah, that would be pretty cool. A central group for topics that some reliable editor adds and removes good feeds from. Maybe Dave implements it in his news reader and then others pick up the idea — has happened before I think. Looking forward to how this pans out…
Yeah, I agree the idea has potential… it just seems like a standards nightmare waiting to happen. If Dave creates a standard by implementation, he’s likely to leave something out, screw it up, or otherwise create some huge growing pains that he wouldn’t if he’d just spec it out.
I guess it is all based on OPML? I’ve not looked closely at the OPML spec. It looks pretty minimialist which is good. And people seem to be able to use it. I think some RSS clients can export OPML subscription lists and load from each other. That’s nice to see.
I do see some odd stuff in OPML. For example., the window position. I mean, I guess you need to know that, and it was handy once to keep everything in one place, but it’s just out of place now. I suppose we can ignore it or populate dummy values.
I’d sure like to see an example OPML reading list somewhere. Any ideas?
http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/...
A MOVEMENT! Interesting take…