Answers for Megan Taylor

“Megan had some questions about River2 which I answered in this brief podcast.”

Hey, this is Dave Reiner here.
I don’t like to do interviews that much, but I do sometimes so I want to help out a reporter. I ask them to just say, “Okay, tell me what you’re writing about. " And see if I can do a blog post about it. And I thought today, so I got a few questions from Megan Taylor at MeganTay lor. org, M-E-G-A-N-T-A-Y-L-O-R.
And so I thought I would try answering them in a little mini podcast.
She’s interested in River 2, and she says, “River 2 is different from most readers, like Google Reader or Blogline, because it’s not intended to work like Gmail.
Most RSS readers let users mark items as red, unread, making sure they can read every single item.
River 2 is more like Twitter, without the interaction between users. " So the questions are, “What are the advantages of viewing a little bit of news instead of email interface? Was there something in particular that inspired this style of news reading, and what features of River 2 do you think would be most useful to journalists working at a specific beat?” So the last question, I don’t have any ideas.
I mean, it’s a tool for reading news, and it’s a fairly generic tool, so it’s not designed specifically for journalists, and it doesn’t have that many features.
So if you say what features would make it most useful to any particular group, the product itself is kind of like the feature.
So what are the advantages of viewing River 2 instead of the email interface? Well, I’m very excited about this, and I don’t think news is email.
I don’t think email is news, so I just don’t think it makes any sense at all to try to force news into that bottleneck.
And the River of News format predates all of those.
I did the first River of News aggregator in 1999.
It was called my. userland. com, and it was one of two ways of reading RSS feeds.
The other one was my. netscape.
com, and that has certainly fallen by the way, but their approach was sort of like an on-screen newspaper, and they sort of said, “Well, put wired in this spot on the newspaper, and put a lot of the fool here, put some on over here, and you lay it out. " Which really, I don’t – it didn’t go anywhere.
Just say that. I didn’t think it was the right thing to go.
And I just started from how I want my news.
I want my news coming to me. It ’s like a teletype.
That’s the historic precedent for River of News in terms of news.
What you want news is about what’s new.
I don’t care how many items I ’ve read or unread. That’s just wrong.
When a piece of software tells you all the time you have not read this number of items, well, first of all, what does that say to the user? It says, “Well, you’re doing something wrong.
Until you get that down to zero , you’re going to be falling behind. " And in fact, a lot of users feel that way. But the newspaper doesn’t do that to you.
The newspaper doesn’t say when it arrives at your doorstep, " Hi, I’m in The New York Times. " And you have not read 837,274 articles that have appeared in The New York Times.
And it’s not telling you all the time. You’re not expected to read every article.
You’re not expected to glance at every article. It’s a busy day.
Sometimes you’re going to read it at the newspaper. And I haven’t subscribed to these papers for many years. So I’m missing a ton of stories.
And that’s life. It’s a big world. There’s a lot of stuff going on.
Some days you want to read the whole thing, like when I’m traveling on an airplane, by copying The New York Times at the airport. And then I read the whole thing, or at least I look at every article. And for that day I would say it.
So the question is, why would they work the way they work? And I think it’s lazy programmers, basically. They didn’t spend a very much time thinking about it.
They just looked at RSS and said, well, this is a lot like e-mail.
I think I’ll just treat it like e-mail. They might not even have thought about it, even at that level of detail.
They might just look at it and just gravitated towards that.
That would be the first guideline. Everybody else should follow them.
They didn’t look at the River of News. And they didn’t talk to any news people, because they don’t think that news people would have told them that news is like e-mail.
If news were like e-mail, we would be e-mailing all the news to each other, and we don’t.
And I think that, you know, so you asked about Twitter, well, yeah, River of News predates Twitter for many, many, many years.
And I think that the popularity of Twitter just confirms what I ’m saying.
This is the way – you know, Twitter isn’t sitting there telling you, well, you know, Twitter would say, if you’re following me, well, Dave has tweeted – well, it does say Dave has tweeted 20,200 and whatever tweets, you know, a lot of tweets, right? But it doesn’t tell you that you haven’t read most of them, yet it hasn’t.
And that’s – I mean, I follow them in 100 people.
What kind of – pardon the expression – what kind of asshole software would be constantly reminding me that I – I mean, it’s really kind of anal retentive of the software to things that I would care to know that number.
So Twitter doesn’t do that.
Twitter presents things in reverse chronological order.
The assumption in Twitter is that I’m going to miss most of what happens.
And you just say, that’s fine.
That’s the way the software works.
And that’s actually the way the news works, too.
You kind of depend on a certain amount of redundancy.
So if you didn’t happen to be there the first time somebody said Michael Jackson died, you’ll be there the 37th time somebody said it.
So in a way, I guess I keep coming back to it.
It’s sort of the way news works .
So I believe I’ve answered the question.
I think this is the way news artists and editors and news editors were meant to work.
I mean, it’s just that simple.
It’s the way I wanted to get my news.
That’s why it works that way.
So anyway, if you have some more follow-up questions on this, send them along in the e-mail.
And I’ll see if you can’t do the same thing again.
So this helps.