Eye on Winer

Dave’s back to his “river of news” pulpit, preaching fire and brimstone again. “Just plain wrong” is what he calls the average news reader which has the nerve to allow you to come back to finish your newsreading another time. Dave seems to think that if you don’t read it at your very first opportunity, you never really wanted to read it and your software should take it away from you… like you’re some sort of dog that’s being trained to eat when the food is put down.

I treat different feeds in my newsreader in different ways. Some of them, like Fark and Digg, I am quick to mark as read (without reading them) if I have a lot of other stuff to catch up on, but if I check back periodically throughout the day, I’ll read all of their headlines. My friends’ blogs, on the other had, I read immediately. The software blogs, on the other hand, those devoted to specific applications, languages, or techniques, I do not read every time I come to my newsreader, but I do not want to miss any of their posts. If my newsreader suddenly started deciding what I wanted to read and what I didn’t, I would miss a lot of those posts.

It’s my news and my feeds. I will decide what I get to read. This is not the “wrong” way. It may not be the way that Dave prefers, and it may not be the best method for certain people, but it is the best method for me and the one I like the best.

NewsGator allows you mark feeds or entire categories as read. If I decide (as I do occasionally) to take a devil-may-care attitude and just jettison all of the new news in my reader, to get a fresh start after a vacation, for example, I’ll “Mark all feeds as read” and go about my business.

In most circumstances, the 3-paned, outlook-style system is cumbersome. But some people may like it. I read my blogs by folder in NewsGator. I keep them separated into logical categories so that I’m reading one thing at a time. News, politics, tech, etc.

I haven’t tried the Earthlink newsreader, and I don’t intend to. I’m perfectly happy with NewsGator and Dave’s description of it scares me — what do they do with my news that I didn’t feel like reading last time? Can I even get to it any more? Regardless, I’m satisfied with my current system. That said, if people like Earthlink’s style, I hope they use it.

I haven’t been a fan of them since they gave me an outrageously hard time when I tried to cancel my service years ago (when I moved to broadband), but if they’re putting out a good product, more power to them.

…

But wait. Isn’t Dave supposed to be about “the users”? The users seem to be perfectly happy with the current newsreading method. Would Dave like it if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates decided, one day, the most efficient method of computing, and then forced it down his throat? He’d scream bloody murder.

Why? Because Dave is the only one that Dave allows to dictate the “correct” way for a user to do something. Everyone else needs to mind the user’s desires… but we’ve all come to realize, I hope, that the only “user” Dave actually cares about is himself.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Dave, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.