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Comment by deno | Hacker News Reader

So, content creators convert their RSS feeds to Twitter feeds and Readstream then converts them back again? Seems pointless. Why not just use the full feed in the first place (if that's what you want, instead of the <140 chars synopsis)?

I don't mean to sound cynical, but surely, I must have missed something.

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That's not how it (appears to) work. This pulls from links tweeted by people you follow. It then uses a content extraction library (similar to Readability's I presume) to grab the content and display. Might be a copyright issue there. So the flow is Content -> Curators (Tweeters) -> Extraction Layer -> Display.

This looks a bit like Zite (http://www.zite.com), which was launched recently. It got sued due to copyright issues.

That's not how Zite works either. Zite doesn't pull links from your feed, it derives interests from your feed and then serves content it thinks you'll like from an internally maintained database.

This looks more similar to Flipboard in how it works on the backend; it just serves the links provided from the feed (although Flipboard probably has much more complicated relevancy algorithms than this weekend project). Also Flipboard, I almost certainly believe, probably doesn't show full articles unless they have an agreement with the content owner (or the full article can be found in RSS). Flipboard's business model is partnering with content owners to create dedicated sections and to feature certain content.

well if you follow RSS on twitter it is your problem. If you follow people who share links, than it is a way better than RSS, because human filter is applied and you are more likely to get an interesting content.

My friends and I did that in 2005 with Google Reader.

But fair enough, the project looks nice. I'd only suggest to implement caching better:

1) Make /get_user_feed.php return only list of stories. E.g. [http://.../story1, http://.../story2]

2) Fetch stories one-by-one using unique links, set proper caching headers

You could also use pro.embed.ly

Nice suggestion - definitely (if implemented) will really help with our SEO. The thing I guess that may be a barrier is actually switching the page and keeping a javascript array or knowing where the user is (guess we can do that via the DB though).

I think this is an amazing point and the main reason we created this. Human curation results in infinitely better content than just reading an RSS feed of the New York Times - and many people use Twitter exactly that way. Readstream just aims to streamline that same content-delivery process.

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