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.)

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com.

I want to revisit an idea I blogged about awhile back. I'd like to see video sharing/broadcasting/recording become an integral part of the OS experience--not just for computers, but for cameras, cell phones, and other digital devices.

A bit of background first. I was at a conference awhile back when I decided to take a picture of a session listing that was being displayed on some monitors. Simple enough right? Well sometimes the little things spawn ideas--and this one did.

As I was adjusting my position left and right to get the display in the field of view of my digital camera as well as to minimize glare, I realized I was going the long way around to capture something that was already digital. What was I doing? And it wasn't just me. There were others standing next to me doing much the same. Silly, I realized.

I thought: Why can't I receive a live, digital broadcast of what's on the display, right within my WiFi-based camera? Why am I capturing "over the air," if you will, rather than going direct?

The more I thought about this, the more I began to see that our graphics chips are throwing away a lot of opportunities for digital sharing of its content.

Now it's true, that there are apps, such as SharedView, VNC, and the like which are designed to share the desktop, but what if the broadcasting experience was provided as a standard in the OS? Camtasia, WebcamMax/Superwebcam, and on and on would essentially be built in with a complementary broadcasting and recording feature built into computers, MIDs, digital cameras, cell phones, and the like.

First, back to the camera capture issue. Record directly is my mantra. In this digital world, there's no reason to go over the visual spectrum.

So let's say I want to capture what's on my friend's computer. Right now you have to adjust all over the place to get the lighting just right--all along trying to avoid seeing yourself in the reflection. When you're recording on the go, this is silly.

What if instead, the person could (for instance), right click on their desktop and select from the context menu "Share Desktop" (or window or region or whatever). With this single click the OS would then appear as a thumbnail overlay on my camera (computer or whatever) which I could then select and record. I could record picture in picture or record to the whole frame, capture a single frame, capture a sequence of frames, or....or....or. Lots of possibilities here.

As I mentioned earlier, there are desktop sharing apps today, but what I'm advocating is that they become more "video" like with embedded content/command-and-control signals--with a two way option. With a common standard--not just a desktop standard--all manner of devices and apps could record the content--directly.

And once the content can be broadcast digitally, there's the whole world that you can broadcast to. Imagine.

So what I'd like to see is an open sharing and broadcasting standard that makes its way into connected devices.

Flash is already starting to show the value of a "video" standard on the Internet. Now we just need to have the recording part opened up. The reasons for locking down the content are holding back a natural evolution of devices that can share, broadcast and record live, interactive streams. It's not just the major studios that want to "broadcast." In fact, I'd argue that they are a small subset of all broadcasting that would take place.

So imagine you're at your next conference and someone is projecting a demo playing on their desktop up on one of several large screens. No more do you have to get just the right seat to get just the right shot of what the person is showing. Instead, they just have to share their desktop and broadcast its contents live directly to your camera or OneNote or whatever. Same goes for the doctor showing you your ultrasound of your unborn child or you MRI. Yes, you can share the files, but you can also share the playback experience with all the interaction...the sound....the movement of the pointer...and the content itself--all to your cell phone, MID, or laptop.

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

This weekend I had a few minutes here and there to get permalinks working in the conversations collected by thredr. I also added a first pass at RSS feeds, although I see that I have a couple things to fix. These changes will have to wait till another day, since I have another project that's above this in the queue.

I also adjusted the ranking algorithm a bit to adjust for the age of the post. I think it's working better. Up to this point people were saying that older stories were staying too long at the top of the list.

Next up I need to improve the navigation. For instance, there are no links to get back to the home page from within the site tree. That's an obvious ommission. :-)

Plenty to do.

The Googlebot appears not to like this blog any more. Tonight, I see that Google is tagging this blog with a bit of doubt. It may be that I've been linking back over to my other blog. I don't know. Maybe it's something else. It'll be interesting to see how easy it is to clear this up. Either that I may be in denail that I'm really a spammer. Hehehe.

Guy Kawasaki and the Truemors team released a new aggregator service today, called Alltop.com, which lists the top five most recent headlines from a variety of leading sites which are divided up into categories, such as celebrities, politics, and sports.

To me, the headlines are made interesting mostly because of the list of sites that are tracked in Alltop. Because the sites they include are quite active, they can give you a good snapshot of what's going on right now. There's more to it than that, however. In some ways, it's also a recommendation engine: "Here are the sites we think you should consider if you're interested in topic XYZ." I'm sure people digging for new, fruitful sites to visit will enjoy stopping by Alltop.

Now, all of this is different than what Bob and I have been working on with thredr. Our system leans more to a TechMeme-like strategy where the most "active conversations" or "threads" are brought to the top of the list. There's "editorializing" if you will in terms of which sites/feeds are tracked and what the ranking algorithm does, but other than that, like Alltop and TechMeme, it can run unattended. We're also reaching out to more content than just blogs and news sites. For instance, we're including YouTube videos and (as of now) a small set of forums.

Another difference with TechMeme (and it appears AllTop for that matter) is that we're focusing on smaller sets of content (micro-conversations), which brings up its own issues. Fewer feeds mean fewer connections, which can lead to more brittleness if not careful--or boring results. It also means the architecture can be quite different and in fact lends itself to other features which we'll be rolling out over the coming weeks.

I like the looks of AllTop. They're way ahead of what we've been doing and I look forward to seeing how it works out. We only have a development server running at this time and lots of code to write before we sleep. :-)

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com