The Need for Feeds
In my post last night complaining about the utter insanity of having to update a dozen different social feeds now each time you want to post something, I joked that it was enough to drive people back to RSS. Of course this is not a joke as I've been using RSS as a sort of "catch all" for content even while the social sites came to dominate content sharing. And my app of choice for that has long been Reeder, a beautiful yet simple RSS client built by developer Silvio Rizzi. But given the lack of updates to Reeder in recent years, I was concerned it might be going the way of Google Reader.
The good news is that it doesn't seem to be, as Bobby noted to me on Threads, pointing to a post by Rizzi on Mastodon (lol, and round and round we go). The more interesting news here seems to be that Rizzi is working on something new. Not a new version of Reeder, but a new idea for how to potential tackle some of the very social feed issues I'm complaining about. As Rizzi writes:
I guess it's time for an update on what I've been working on over the last year: A new app, completely rebuilt and rethought from the ground up. This probably won’t replace the current Reeder (not going away) for a lot of users.
It's not just an RSS reader. The app allows you to access content from various other sources like Podcasts, YouTube, Mastodon, and more.
It won't sync everything, only your saved items (favorites etc).
No more unread counts, it remembers the scroll positions instead.
Clearly (given his screenshot), he felt compelled to poke his head out after seeing the coverage about Project Tapestry, another social feed aggregator project from The Iconfactory, which I wrote about last week. It's interesting and humorous and not at all surprising that so many folks seem to be working on the same general problem at the same time. It's sort of like in the 1990s when we got two volcano movies at the same time. And then the very next year got two asteroid movies at the same time. Great ideas are just great ideas.
What I like about Rizzi's approach is that he doesn't seem to be going for a full-on catch-all feed here (which I worry will just be way too much content to parse in any sort of reasonable way), but instead is focused on items you explicitly save from various feeds (via bookmarks or favorites, etc). Assuming he can get all the correct APIs working to feed such content into this new feed he's making, that could be quite compelling... It sounds like we'll see soon enough!