Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

One of the cool things that can be done with the Google Reader (now that it integrates with Gtalk contacts), is proxying of items from one set of people to another via a common connection.  Consider, for example, my contact list with Person A and Person B, both of who don’t know each other, but share a common interest.  Person A is subscribed to Mega Feed RSS, which neither me, nor Person B is subscribed to.  One day there is a really cool post in the Mega Feed RSS, which Person A markes as “shared”.  Since Person A is in my contact list and I decided to see his shared items too, that item will popup in my Google Reader.  I’ll read it, and then decide that it is indeed a great post which some of my other contacts might be interested in.  Instead of annoying them all with an email, I’ll just mark it as “Shared” in my Google Reader, and this item will appear in Person B’s items from friends.

Here are the nice parts of the above process:

• One news channel for everything - your news, and news from your friends.  No mixing of RSS items with emails and IMs.
• No data duplication.  We don’t copy-paste and send the item over and over again.  Instead, we just share the same piece of data.
• Control of the incoming streams in user hands.  If you don’t like the items someone is sharing, just “hide” the user via “Settings”.  Nobody is annoying anybody.
• People in your contact list help you find the sources and content that you might be interested in.

Last time I tried to complain about missing functionality at BlogLines I got everything wrong. I acknoledged the fact, but my ego wanted a revenge. It wanted me to find something that is really missing so that I could write a proper post on the subject. After lots of thinking and playing around with other tools, I finally found a good issue to complain about - synchronization automation.

Here is what I mean.

[Read more →]

After some poking around I found another piece of functionality that is missing from BlogLines, but which I’d appreciate very much to have. I am talking about feed-based item sorting. Currently, there is a global setting which one could use to specify the way to order the items in the feed - new items first or old items first. But this is not enough.

As an example, consider two different feed sources - a news site and a forum. For the news site I’d like to have newest items first. This way, if I missed on the feed, I can go directly to the most current news and play a catch-up game later. With the forum, on the other hand, I would prefer to go through old messages first to understand where the discussion started and how it progressed. It has to do with continuity I guess. News from the news site are not so often connected to each other. They are separate pieces of content. Forum discussions, on the other hand, tightly link posts together and it is often difficult to understand what’s going on without reading earlier part of the thread.

As things are now, it is impossible to sort different feeds in the different way.

Update: The functionality is there. I just never saw it. Sorting can be changed by clicking on the ‘Sort Newest First’ link under the name of the feed. Thanks to Constantinos for pointing it out.