What I’ve learned while testing thredr
We’re about to go live with what we have on thredr–our micro-conversation tracker. And this is as good as time as any to look back to what I’ve learned over the last couple weeks.
First, there’s the RSS. You wouldn’t believe all the messy feeds out there. Some from small sites. Some from major news organizations. Despite all the clamouring for web standards, you can see that people don’t follow them. I’ve given up being too restrictive here. It is what it is.
Also, when it comes to RSS, there are definitely patterns within various communities. For instance, in the Apple community it’s quite common to only provide a partial feed. I don’t get this, but oh, well. Microsoft developers are on the other end of the spectrum–they typically share everything. There are also lots more of them, sharing much more content.
I also noticed that outside of a few key sites, linking isn’t all that common in photography blogs (and with many Apple sites too). This surprised me. There aren’t as many “conversations” in blogs as I expected. Instead, these two communities are more active in forums. In fact, it wasn’t until thredr started reading through forums, that the richness of the conversations started showing up in these areas. This is also true in the finance area, but I’m haven’t found the magic recipe yet.
How useful have I found thredr? I’m probably a biased sample, but thredr has pretty much done what I expected. It gives me a quick glance at what’s going on in various communities. In fact, it’s become my number one way to check news in the Apple and Microsoft developer spaces. The top news stories consistently migrate to the top of the page in both of these areas. The one problem I’ve had is that some of the big breaking stories stay too long at the top, but I’m working on that.
In terms of the Tablet page, it really came to life once I added Eee PCs, OLPCs, and the like. Not only is the variety more interesting, it’s also showing me how active these other markets are right now. It makes sense, but you can really see it in the volume of conversations going on in these areas.
All this being said, I’m still a fan of techmeme and I visit it several times a day. It’s richness goes far beyond thredr–of course, the two are designed with two different goals in mind.
Finally, are “conversations” the way to track news. Not completely. I still think the more reading you do, the better off you are. Thredr provides just one slice of the news. There are other ways to tracks what’s going on. AllTop.com lists the most recent headlines from a variety of top sites. And Google Reader let’s you pull a variety of feeds together in any way you like. Each has its value.
So this weekend or next, I’ll flip the switch on thredr and let it run automatically. I’m thinking I’ll rebuild the conversation list every hour or so. Hopefully that’ll be frequent enough.