SeeSaws20Toolbox…

Some very interesting rails tools fro the seesaw crew.

“River of news” getting crowded?

It seems that the River of News model for aggregators is getting new attention. Humanized Reader got great reviews from Steve Rubel and 37signals and they deserve all of it: their solution is particularly well designed (even if i feel it being too much blog like…) and the dynamic scroll is awesome.

This renforces my own experience: I’ve never been able to use an aggregator for more than a few hours before i tried the NewsRiver aggregator built into the OPML editor which has been my feed reader ever sicne i tried it for the first time (thanks Dave!):

The interaction with those modeled as a mail reader seemed unnatural to me, I shared much of the feelings that the Humanized crew has:

They had lots of modes. They made me stop and think about navigation every time I looked at the title of a post and every time I finished reading one.

An aggregator is a reading instrument for a very special form of literature which is different from email or books and as such should be built and designed for a different reading experience.

I’ve found that the river of news design is a natural way to read the flow of information coming in the form of feeds. Its interface stays out of the way when reading the news while it gives the correct support for organizing them. Showing the freshest on top and pushing down the (long) page the older it lets me use my prior experience of to find older items.

I’m so convinced of this that a couple of weeks ago i started to build an online aggregator following the river of news design. It’s called Tiber (like the big italian river I live nearby) Now I’m really looking forward to release it and see how it compares with the others.