July

The Future of VoIP

Monday, October 23, 2006 8:23 PM (permalink)

...is only limited by our imagination. Services like this one make it painfully clear that Vonage is not a telecommunications company, Vonage is a marketing company--just like Coca-Cola. Except Coke's formula is still a secret.

Now, if they could just do something about my mobile phone bill...

The Almost Perfect Feed Reader

Wednesday, July 19, 2006 12:00 AM (permalink)

I have experimented with at least 10 different feed readers so far, and the one I generally keep coming back to is NewsGator, primarily because I like to use NetNewsWire on my Mac, but still use a web reader from time to time. I suppose I could sync Bloglines with a desktop client, but I do like NetNewsWire a lot, and it is especially easy to blog with (NewsFire has an even better interface, and if it had easy one-click options to blog and send to de.licio.us, I would love it even more--but I am soooo lazy that I can't be bothered to go up to the menu bar to select these things.

Recently, though, I have come across three different "next gen" web-based feed readers that are all worth mentioning for various reasons:

1. The Humanized Reader (still in beta, and not yet ready for prime-time) attempts to do away with the familiar motif of Google's "pages" (i.e., click on the next page to get more search results) and instead simply give you more news if you want it--in other words, as long as you keep scrolling down, it will keep populating the page. I think that is a great idea if you have a manageable number of feeds (I don't, sadly)--a very user-friendly experience. The link I gave you, however, returns all feeds. I fear that just giving you that link might set me up for a lawsuit--when your relatives find you, after eight days of starvation, still scrolling down until you consume the entire internet, don't say I didn't warn you...

2. I love NewsHutch, (also in beta) which is drop-dead gorgeous. It strips away a lot of the excess "features" of most web-based news readers, and presents possibly the most attractive, simple and easy-to-use interface for reading feeds I have used to date. It hasn't replaced NetNewsWire for me, because a lot of my feed reading is tied to updating various blogs and content for my company, but if all you want to do is kick back and read, NewsHutch is just stellar.

3. Finally, Flock's time has arrived. After playing around with its slower, buggier predecessors, I can now report that the Flock browser is extremely usable and useful, especially if you are a blogger. The built-in feed reader, blogging interface and Flickr integration mean that you can grab an article or link, wrap it around a picture, and get it on your blog all within the browser, and all without a hitch. Is it perfect? No, but what is? I wish the feed reader behaved slightly better, and that I had an interface to my previous blog posts that worked like MarsEdit, but if you only had a copy of Flock on a USB drive, you are a lean, mean blogging machine from any computer in the world.

What would I love to see in a web-based feedreader? My biggest gripe right now is that none of these readers sync with my desktop client, but that is a small issue. I want my feed reader to be as simple and pleasurable to read as NewsFire (NewsHutch is pretty much there) but have integrated clipping/blogging functionality like Flock. The Lektora/Qumana combination are close, since they provide the web-based experience but cache everything locally, so I can use my browser like an off-line client, but right now the integration between Lektora (the feedreader) and Qumana (the blogging client) is broken and Lektora feels like it isn't getting enough love to me.

My perfect reader--Newshutch, running on localhost (like Lektora) with one-button clip/publish functionality. Plus a pony.