Feed aggregator madness December 5, 2006
Would you read a newspaper that forced you to read through a list of every author in the current issue, then go to a list of what they wrote in today’s issue? Would you use an e-mail client that had no inbox but made you click on a list of all the people you ever got mail from in order to see what they sent you today?
I think we can safely assume the answer to that question is no!… hell no! So why is it that the creators of so many feed (rss, atom, etc.) aggregators make you do just that? Todays example comes from Newshutch. I read in one of the feeds I subscribe to that it was a nice ajax based ui so I gave it a test and uploaded an opml file of all my feeds only to be presented with the following UI horror. Click on the image to see it full size, this is just 50% but even at that size you can see how completely unworkable it is. I assume this would be useful if you were only subscribed to a few feeds, but what’s the point of only subscribing to a few feeds. It’s better to just bookmark them and view them in their full glory along with peoples comments.
Just imagine that this was your list of feeds for a second and imagine what a pain it would be to click on every single one that happened to have new content and you’ll know why I use Google Reader. Also, what’s the deal with that stupid first time user section across the top? It’s fine the first time you come to the page but there doesn’t appear to be any way to make it stop appearing there.
[update: there was an incredibly long screenshot here…but our server’s disk got corrupted and ate it. If i come across a backup of that file i’ll add it back in.]
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