It must be Tuesday (or at least it was yesterday), because there’s one more news aggregator site online now. This one is called NewsPond. TechMeme, TechCrunch, Mashasble have the breaking news. After all, this is a “2.0″ friendly site and that’s where the 2.0 news usually is. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

Newspond is TechMeme-like in that it pulls together and ranks news stories and blog posts. However, unlike TechMeme it has a decidely un-Google-like design, comments, and many more topics than TechMeme.

While working on Thredr I can see how NewsPond came up with these design decisions to not only differentiate it, but also to try to make it more “attractive” and useful.

The UI really sticks out. A tad on the thick side, it makes you wonder if it’s not time to forgo the “efficient” Google look and render pages more like magazines. Personally, it’s not either here or there, but I wonder if that’s what people want and expect now. Are the days of the light Google layout over? Me thinks not, but we’ll have to see.

I do like Newspond’s support for multiple topics. This is where TechMeme needs to go even further. A bit about this in a moment.

What about the commenting system? Good idea. I think it brings people back to Newspond–although again for me I don’t find this the most useful. But I can appreciate it’s social value. We are in the 2.0 era after all.

OK, so back to the issue of multiple topics. For those that have been following Bob and my work with Thredr, this is a big deal to me. This is why I started working on Thredr in the first place.

 

I love TechMeme, but unfortunately it doesn’t give the level of coverage I want and need for the types of news I follow. In particular, I want to track the top conversations going on in the Tabletsphere. TechMeme has bits of this, but there’s much more out there. So “necessity” being the mother of invention, I decided to write my own TechMeme-like conversation collector. It’s still under development–as a part-time project–but I’m actively using it to track Tablet news and we’ve put it online (even in its unfinished state) so others can use it if they’d like.

Like Newspond and unlike TechMeme, thredr supports a collection of topics–which by design are fairly easy to expand. So far the topics thredr tracks include: All things Apple, Finance, Tablet PCs/UMPCs/OLPCs/MIDs/Surface, Photography, and the Microsoft developer community. We hope to be adding more topics down the road and even opening this up to others.

Some reactions we’ve gotten about thredr: It’s look is too plain; too Google like. That’s my fault. Bob keeps reminding me that this isn’t 1999 anymore and to get with it. Yeah, you can tell I’m an engineer. I want to focus most on the content. But I get the point. I need to work on this. It’s not all that obvious to me what it should be like anyway. I figure what’s really needed in the design will bubble up. I’m kind of slow that way :-).

And personally, I like the thin look. It works really well on my iPhone, for instance, which has become one of my favorite ways to check for news on the go or even at home. I can check it in 15 seconds and then move on if there’s nothing of interest at the time. I think this pattern is going to become more common for more people too. So I admit I’ve kept the design somewhat mobile minded. 

People want to create their own sets of topics. I agree. That’s the reason I wanted to work on this project in the first place. Bob is working on the pieces to make this happen. There’s no ETA yet for this, but when he gets it going, we’ll let you know.

What about comments or voting or some other social design? We haven’t put in anything yet. Still thinking. Here’s my problem with this. As soon as you have a commenting or voting system, you have to have a sign in process. Not only do I hate to log into yet another system, at this point I don’t want to deal with any of that from an infrastructure standpoint. For now, it’s all about the content. Tomorrow, maybe this will be different and we’ll leverage readers to suggest, prune, merge, rank, split, and comment upon stories. That’ll have to come later.

And one more thing. In Michael Arrington’s comments about Newspond, I think he misses a big point as to why these news aggregators make sense. For those of us that digest lots of news, we often turn to RSS readers, however, the plain simple truth is that we quickly wind up with too much stuff to read and then stop reading altogether. I’ve heard this from many people. I’m guilty of this too.

What I find most useful is a digested view that gives me the “top” news stories of the day. TechMeme does this very well, particularly for Web 2.0ish type of news. I’m working on thredr to make it worthy in this respect.

What’s so amazing to me is how many news aggregators are popping up. When we started thredr, it seemed like nothing was going on. Now it seems like a new one is launching every week. I wonder what next Tuesday will bring :-).

(By the way, if you do try out thredr, yes, I know the RSS feeds are broken outside of viewing them in Safari. I’ve been meaning to fix that. And yes, I know that there’s no UI element to take you “back” to the home page. I need to fix these. Sorry.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 7:16 am and is filed under Blogging, thredr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.