Dave Winer posts today:
Question for Yahoo, Google, Bloglines, anyone else who wants to run a centralized aggregation service. I can’t speak for anyone else, but the user interface I want is the one in the Convention Bloggers site. It’s derived from Radio’s aggregator, which was derived from My.UserLand. It’s designed to let the reader skim over hundreds of articles in just a few minutes. It works. Why mess around emulating three-paned email interfaces. In my humble opinion, if you just emulated this interface you’d clean up.
You think Dave might think to ask once in awhile if his method isn’t broken when so many other popular sites use different methods.
As I’ve said before, the problem with Radio is that this simply doesn’t scale. I didn’t check my Bloglines account at all since late Thursday, so there are currently more than 27,000 unread stories there across almost 300 different feeds. Simply lumping them altogether in one single scrolling display would be a horrible interface — and one of the reasons I and others stopped using Radio in favor of sites like Bloglines (actually I’m still waiting for a deal breaking feature to be fixed in the otherwise excellent FeedDemon).
Instead, I have my feeds divided into a couple dozen categories and I can quickly get to information I really need to see while ignoring and marking as read the rest. WHy do Bloglines, etc. use the three pane system — because it just works for users, even if a handful of developers still don’t like it.