I think a 2013 Reader should be an open source web app you can run yourself or pay to use as a service, which runs on a server pulling in feed data, and then as a detachable HTML5+JS+localstorage client that downloads the data and can run offline.
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
As someone who works on an RSS crawler day to day, this is much more difficult than you think because of how poorly most people implement RSS.
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.
We should really be ditching RSS in favor of more flexible platforms like those on schema.org. The web is constantly evolving and changing; to try to keep some extremely legacy tech in tow is just asking for trouble. It's not even useful for its structure, as people are misusing it, so I don't see why we should. At least following schema.org conventions aides in your SEO.
OwnCloud is a WebApp that replicates a lot of cloud services (file sync [android and desktop client], contacts, calendar, streaming music, etc.). It's available as FOSS or with commercial licenses.
Looking forward to it maturing. I have the alpha installed on my server but it's obviously still pretty buggy. They way it looks, all it'll take to bring it to Google Reader awesomeness is some CSS editing.
I've seen a lot of people bemoaning the loss of Google Reader's ability to see old items which aren't in the RSS feed anymore. Unfortunately, that feature can't be implemented as well without centralization.
So you're saying that we should either be willing to pay $5/m for an RSS reader service, or $5/m to host the service ourselves?
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.
> So you're saying that we should either be willing to pay $5/m for an RSS reader service, or $5/m to host the service ourselves?
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.
The ability to detach the frontend and control the storage backend was a pretty big motivation for http://grimwire.com/local/. You might implement the RSS backend to serve an environment for running RSS apps. Then you'd write the GUI as one of those apps. The separation would allow you to change backend or frontend independently.
I like this. Kind of reminds me of the WordPress.org/.com model. If I don't want to run it myself I can easily use .com, but if I want full control I can easily run the .org software on my own server.
I'm actually fairly optimistic about this idea. Digg hasn't found its place yet really after their pivot, and I think a reader will really give them a lens to look forward with.
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.
"Digg hasn't found its place yet really after their pivot, and I think a reader will really give them a lens to look forward with."
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)
I think stepping up any process that can get them a user base that even passively interacts with them on a regular basis is better than anything else for them right now. They're in that odd position that they have a well known name but no well known product behind it. They kind of have to play it reactionary if they're going to keep that name in the position it's in.
RIP Digg. I think if they had just downgraded from v4 they could've retained some users (the "twitter killed digg" meme is overstated), sure they would've lost face but they at least would've kept some users.
Yeah, Digg version 2 was my favourite - back when it was a just a really simple technology news site with higher then average comment quality (a bit like Hacker News is now).
It really degraded fast as they expanded, and every upgrade seemed to make it worse...
Digg has always been late with everything since they lost their throne at the top. I doubt the world will wait for them to deliver something new.
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?
I've wanted Tumblr to allow you to subscribe to external rss feeds for a while (I think it did at one point) -- some of he blogs I read are text heavy, some are graphics heavy, etc., and it would be nice to have separate readers optimized for the different types of content. It would be nice to be able to subscribe to "tumblrs" on the tumblr dashboard whether or not they're actually hosted on tumblr.
Reddit's kind of the same thing: it would be nice to have a reader integrated with the discussion.
The dashboard isn't good at telling you whether you've seen a post already and moves much too fast for traditional blogs that post once a day or less to even show up within the first few pages. I don't think Tumblr has the right UI for an RSS reader.
Sure, but there are plenty of light, "pretty" blogs that I'll browse when I have time to kill, and tumblr wouldn't be bad for that. I'm not arguing in favor of Tumblr necessarily, but specialization. I'd love Twitter to have a separate but connected rss reader, for "twitter-like" content, for example. Any of these social network or quasi social network services could offer a customized rss reader - it's like having the best JavaScript "share this page on..." button possible.
Doesn't each content provider (Digg, Reddit, Tumblr, etc) providing its own RSS reader defeat the purpose of RSS in the first place? The reason I enjoyed Reader (or any RSS reader for that matter) is the fact I didn't need to visit X number of sites to read content.
I see what you're saying but I am not suggesting that people would use all these services all the time. The point is that you would have a choice of "getting" your content in the application you are most comfortable with. Imagine if you are a daily user of TweetDeck and know how to filter your content (so you have relatively mastered the information overload already). Now, wouldn't it be better for you if you could pull in RSS feeds as well into TweetDeck?
Maybe I am misunderstanding your ideas but I guess I don't see the benefit of visiting Tumblr's RSS reader to read Tumblr. Why not just read from Tumblr's website at that point?
I think the original commenter's point was that they frequently use Tumblr's current method of reading other Tumbls, and they would prefer that other web content appear there, too.
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.
It actually sounds awesome that Digg is behind it.
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...
Doesn't this seem a bit too-little-too-late? Right now is the big shuffle, and unless there's a really big revolution I don't see another such opportunity coming for a long time.
I see two big shuffles: there's one right now, when all the proactive people are finding replacements for google reader. There will be another when google reader actually shuts down, when all the procrastinators are looking for a replacement.
For me the dream team was GReader combined with the PostRank (Chrome Extension) to filter based on social metrics. Unfortunately PostRank was the second most important product that Google is its wisdom (and evilness) decided to shut down. For an idea of the power see: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=tWri7T3f4.... Each row of the GReader would be lighter or darker based on the PostRank or you could simply filter based on minimum PR rating.
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.
Can anyone tell me why every one of these articles has this quote or a similar on in there?
"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.
I really miss the social aspect of Google reader before they axed it back in 2011. It's not really social in the traditional sense, it's social in the sense that I could outsource the job of scouring feeds on various topics to other people. Everything they found interesting would be mainlined right into my reader interface so I didn't have to personally check 20 feeds on Android.
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.
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