We're Building A Reader
blog.digg.com
blog.digg.com
Building another hosted RSS reader project just gets us back to step 1 in terms of one company's ability to yank away a tool that functions almost like a newspaper to many people today.
NewsBlur looks like it just got a ton of new github watchers since this announcement, and would maybe be good to treat as the defacto "open RSS reader platform" leader - https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
Someone with a lot of feeds wouldn't be able to fit all of them in the 5 MB that DOM Storage allows. I wouldn't like an offline feed since a big majority of my feeds are videos and podcasts.
As for them being able to yank away at any time, you're right, but there's going to be enough new stuff out there that it wont be a problem, this time we wont have a monopoly.
Why is that so unreasonable? Though, I think it's likely that the hosted solution would be much cheaper than self-hosting, since you don't need to rent one server per user, a hosted solution could be much more efficient.
If everyone stuck to the standards and did things the same way, it would be easy. If you can't account for these errors your reader wont work with 80% of feeds, and nobody will use it.
Rss feeds are usually programmed more poorly than a website itself, because it's one of those features that comes from a discussion that usually goes: "well everyone has an rss feed, so we should have one, so make one". Yet they know people will rarely use it.
You could make it work for the popular CMS's but even between those there are standards problems. The majority of the problems are in storing the stuff that's crawled.
^upvoted! I agree, it's horrible! Not only are the many different versions of RSS & ATOM a problem, but the freedom of putting any kind of data in any of the fields. I've seen "descriptions" in the "title" property, "images" in "links", "links" in "images", "links" as "urls", "UUID" as "ids", and so on and on and on. If it wasn't for Java ROME, I would be spending dozens of hours just making our aggregator compatible to any newsfeed our users come up with.
Stick to the standards, folks!
("OwnCloud" is hipster for "web hosting", I guess?)
Not free though.
What I'd really like to see Digg do is move towards dealing with social sharing of news not completely unlike Kippt. They could have it so that your personal feed could be a(n easily seperable) mix of both your rss feed and your friends/folowees. Then they could make their frontpage an aggregation of commonly shared stories, sortable by tags. I think that would really allow them to be a social news hub that's different than a lot of the social news hubs out there now, with the name recognition of Digg.
That's not clear. FTA it was much later in the roadmap, so its not clear whether stepping up that process now makes sense (or if they are reacting to current demand that is quickly dissipating as people commit to other products)
It really degraded fast as they expanded, and every upgrade seemed to make it worse...
Sites like Digg, Reddit, Tumblr etc should provide their own version of RSS readers. Wordpress.com has recently introduced their own reader and it supposedly has a feature to browse external sites. Why can't Reddit and Tumblr do the same thing?
Why?
Reddit's kind of the same thing: it would be nice to have a reader integrated with the discussion.
It's not visiting Tumblr's Reader to read Tumblr - it's visiting Tumblr's Reader to read everythign.
How about your guy build on top it, I can contribute the whole source code (anyway, it's open source)
The reasons I do so:
1. Rss Reader needs a lot of hardware resources for storing/fetch feeds. A big company have much better resource than I can offer. 2. I can provide some paid support for rssminer's code.
The reasons why it may be helpful for you guys:
1. Rssminer is fully working, you can save a lot of time, faster product 2. The code is very clean. https://github.com/shenfeng/rssminer 3. The code is very fast. In order for it to be fast, I even write an event driven http clent and server: https://github.com/http-kit/http-kit
If interested, drop me an email: shenedu@gmail.com
I can already picture the frontpage of Digg made of posts that were most liked by individual users on their RSS feed. of Comments on Digg about the RSS item.
Anyone sees this as a huge potential? You don't need to post anything, you just need to like your own rss feed and posts gets promoted. You can check comments in case other users are following the same rss feed as you etc...
The one and only enhancement beyond this would be to integrate an Instapaper-type functionality so I have all my content in one place, whether fed by RSS, or random pages that I tag to read later as I come across them.
Digg is one of the few companies that I could see pull off the social dimension successfully.
"We’ve heard people say that RSS is a thing of the past, and perhaps in its current incarnation it is..." I've seen about a dozen posts on HN about Google Reader being retired so RSS readers clearly still appeal to at least this demographic. My girlfriend will also dearly miss Google Reader so it can clearly appeal to non-technical folks as well...
What has replaced RSS readers, Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? As someone who doesn't use social media I would say no. Google Reader is, for me, still the quickest way to get interesting news / information. I don't understand why all the articles state RSS is dead as a fact.
Does the author mean RSS as a format or aggregated feeds being "a thing of the past"?
I don't think feeds have achieved their potential yet.
I do hope that Digg can create a simple and fast interface that captures this concept without too much clutter from the more traditional social features.
Somehow I doubt they are dismayed. Excited, maybe?