I just did something I’ve been waiting months to do. I purchased Reeder for Mac from the App Store.

It isn’t very often that I am so anxious to pay for something that I have been using for free. In fact, I can’t remember any other application that I’ve wanted to purchase more than Reeder for Mac. For months I’ve been using Reeder for Mac’s “beta” builds and they have progressed steadily and swiftly from a pretty good application to an indispensable one. Its workflows are so well refined that it allows me to accomplish a task that – at one point in my life – used to take hours and hours of my time each day. With Reeder for Mac I’m able to keep up-to-date with everything going on in my world in only minutes per day instead of hours. I’m able to use the same workflows no matter which device I happen to currently be on because I use Reeder on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone. In fact, I simply can not imagine owning a Mac, iPad or iPhone without having Reeder installed.

I suppose I’ve wanted to pay for the application for so long because I’ve wanted to put my money where my mouth was and to finally pay tribute to those that have worked so hard on it. To provide them with the resources they need to keep the application in existence and, dare I say, improve it. I’m really looking forward to the future of these applications.

So, I guess it goes without saying that I recommend you pick up Reeder for Mac too. Oh, and for iPad. Oh, and for iPhone. You’ll thank me later.

After searching on GitHub for scripts that did the same thing I didn’t come up with much. Hopefully this both fills that void and gets better because it is now out in the open.

However, there are some Twitter accounts that I’d like to follow, but not “follow”.  Take for instance the Twitter account for a local newspaper in my area The Times Tribune (timestribune on Twitter).  The Times Tribune’s web site sucks, since it doesn’t even have RSS feeds to subscribe to, yet they manage to syndicate their news to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. Go figure.

Anyway, long story short.  I don’t follow them on Twitter.  I created an “imaginary friend” on FriendFeed ((Unfortunately, and I’m not sure why, FriendFeed does not allow me to share my imaginary friends with you. I’m hoping that in the future FriendFeed enables the sharing of one’s imaginary friends)) using their Twitter account and the RSS feed for their group on Flickr.  Now I get news updates delivered to me through Twhirl.

Just incase I miss something on Twhirl (since I don’t watch it 24/7), I’ve also subscribed to the feed that FriendFeed generates for this imaginary friend.

I told you it was a simple tip.

“They are like a time machine…”

Do me a favor and watch Robert’s show (you can watch it on his blog post without downloading anything) so that you can see that statement in clear context.

We all struggle to create simple definitions for complex technologies, but time machine? He makes a good point, in that feeds can really save people a lot of time, because they save the need to actually load every single site the person wants to read on a daily basis. But everything  that I know tells me that when you try to define something, it should be clear, concise, and not leave anything to mystery, or the need of further definition.

Pick up any dictionary and look at the definition of a word. Pick one, there are tons of them. Every definition offered for each word in that book leaves no question as to the meaning of the word. Even fairly complex words that have meanings rooted in history so far back that some of the origins have already been forgotten – yet someone has taken the time to come up with a succinct way of stating exactly what that words means. Sometimes, a word means different things – perhaps even to different people – and so the dictionary offers nearly all of those as well.

So what about feeds? What is a good way to describe feeds to those yet unaware of them?

How would I know? Two years ago (almost to the day) I gave a really horrible definition to what feeds are that I, for no reason whatsoever, called the unified feed theory:

“A “feed” is a way of syndicating almost any type of content (be it articles, essays, plain or rich text, images, audio, or video) in a simple and portable way. Feeds are generally used to distribute frequently updated content, such as news and notifications. An example of this would be CNNs feeds, which provide headline feeds on various topics to keep their readers up-to-date with news. To take advantage of any feed on the Internet, you will need a “Feed reader” or a Web site service that is capable of reading these feeds. These feed readers appear very much like an email application, in essence you’re being ‘emailed’ every time one of your “subscriptions” update their content. Many people who have many Web sites they visit regularly, use feeds to be notified of these updates rather than visiting hundreds of Web sites each day.”

I’m amazed I even added punctuation! But, live and learn, right? So as I heard Mr. Engleman say “time machine” I thought about how, two years later, I’d describe feeds to someone. I think I’d say something utterly simple like:

“Feeds are kinda like email. When a web site is updated you’re notified of the change without needing to visit the site.”

This description does not describe how feeds work, that you’ll need an aggregator, or even give an example use really – it is straight forward and is built upon knowledge that most people already have. If someone wants to know more, maybe they’ll do a little research or ask for more information. But I think it portrays the idea pretty easily. While my crude definition from late-2005 is accurate, it is a pain to read and long winded.

Two years from now I’m sure that I’ll be able to describe feeds even more succinctly. But I look forward more to the day when feeds no longer have a learning curve at all, sort of like email. You sign up to an ISP and you’re given an email address and a, well – maybe a Bloglines account.

Hey, Mr. Engleman – ever think about getting every single person that logs onto the Internet to use feeds the moment they connect to the Internet by automatically setting up their accounts for them? Something to think about. Kill the learning curve by setting it up for them.

… my main reason for not using some of the most popular web applications has been because I can not use them offline. I am a firm believer in having all of my data available to me at anytime. — Why I’m excited about Google Gears

Yes, I am. But there comes a time when you must give something a try, regardless of your preconcieved notions, even if just for the sake of trying something new. I had tried to switch to Google Reader, prior to yesterday, with no luck. But finally I took a few hours, yes – a few hours – and bit the bullet and switched because I was having a few problems with NetNewsWire.

My tags in Google Reader

My main reasons for wanting to switch to Google Reader, prior to actually doing so, were:

• It is free.
• I can use it on my iPhone. Again, for free.
• I can access it from any Internet connected computer.
• The interface is completely customizable.
• It makes good use of “tags”.
• The keyboard shortcuts are amazing.
• With Google Gears, I could use it offline.

I was having some trouble, only recently, with NetNewsWire where it would crash without generating a crash report. Normally I would have gone through the process of emailing the developers a copy of my .console log – but I decided to use it as an opportunity to try out Google Reader, and also slim down my number of subscriptions substantially.

As of yesterday if you had asked me how many feed subscriptions I had I would have answered you with “750+” or “too many”. As much as I enjoy reading, it was getting harder and harder to keep up with everything in my feed reader and I was finding myself unable to retain as much of the information because I ended up skimming everything.

As of today I would answer “less than 200″. In fact, until I went in and subscribed to a few “activity notification feeds” I was down to 157. That means I slimmed down my number of subscriptions by over 80%! Sometimes a fresh pair of clothes is all you need to really get something done.

I’ll check in on this subject again in the future (perhaps in a month or so)… but so far my experience with the latest version of Google Reader has gone swimmingly. Far better than it had in the past.

Which leads me to my response to a post by Michael Meiser who has some Ramblings about Viddler’s time based commenting and tagging… among other things. Michael has some really great ideas on how Viddler could improve commenting (he doesn’t really get into rambling about tagging) – but perhaps he’s missed our first step to solving his problem. Michael says:

Viddler’s time based tagging and commenting is interesting but let me know when they get the comments out of flash and use the blog API (blogger.com, moveabletype, wordpress) to post them as “real comments” to your blog post where they belong? where they can be read with the rest of the comments, where they can be tracked with co.mments.com and other trackers, where they can be syndicated with RSS? where I can actually READ them instead of them being in a tiny little 320×240 little window.

The bottom line is there’s two different conversations here. There’s the one in viddler, which is? whatever? can’t follow it. And then there’s the one in the page? which is awesome and useful?. and I can actually read? and which I will actually get responses on because I?m tracking it with co.comments.com.

When I started at Viddler in January of this year, one-month after the site went live, this was my primary complaint about Viddler. The comments were trapped. The conversation was stifled because the UI didn’t lend itself to inline responses. So, we set forth a roadmap to fixing these issues. The first step was improving the timed-commenting interface and creating a way to thread responses. This improved conversations inside the flash-player very much. The second step, which was completed and launched during our last major version upgrade, was to pull the conversations out of the flash player and onto the page to make them much more readable.

Michael’s suggestions fall on the heels of his watching Chris Messina‘s excellent rant about Mozilla. A video that has received a great deal of attention and with that – a good deal of conversation has been had on the timeline. Some 26 comments have occurred on the timeline, mottling up the interface a bit (something that Viddler is always striving to improve upon). Looking at the main video page for Chris’ video it becomes very easy to follow the conversation happening on the timeline.* So in a way, we’ve already taken steps to improve the ability to follow conversations.

Let’s say, however, that Chris wanted to keep his conversation completely on his site so that he could keep track of it much more easily. All he’d have to do is adjust the options for his video to turn off comments on his video and post the video to his weblog. Or, if Chris wanted only timed comments, he could have easily turned off comments on his blog post and pointed everyone to Viddler for commenting. But Chris chose to allow both, knowingly or unknowingly I don’t know.

Michael also remarks that he’d like comments to be “…syndicated with RSS?…”. This, again, was one of the first things we took care of in our latest revision of the system. Every single video has a feed for subscribing to comments (just like most weblogs do). Simply append /feed/ to the end of any video URL. For example, to subscribe to the comments Chris’ Mozilla rant, you’d use this url. The feed will not only syndicate the comments made on the video, but also will link you to the moment in time the comment was made. Perhaps we do not have enough of a visual indicator for these feeds (since we only broadcast their availability via “feed detection” enabled browsers). If this is the complaint I’m sure we could update the site to make the existence of these feeds much more apparent.

So what is the next step regarding Michael’s ramblings? Will Viddler start using the MetaWeblogAPI to post comments made on the timeline onto the user’s blogs? I am not sure that is the clear cut answer. I think the interface for that could get a little crazy and most people’s weblog designs wouldn’t really work to link back to the moments in time that these comments happened (but that doesn’t mean that Michael’s thoughts on this haven’t gotten my brain’s wheels spinning and I hope to address this in greater detail with the Viddler team in the near future). In the meantime though, perhaps improving the way some of the options are worded, or perhaps some more tips are in order? Maybe explaining to the content producers that if they’d like to keep their conversations in one place, that the best way to do that is to either turn commenting off on Viddler or on their blog. Either would work. Lets not lose sight of the fact that Viddler is doing something very new with timed-comments – and that it will take some time before all of the dust settles and the right solutions for these problems become very clear. Remember when Trackbacks started mottling up Comments? Now every blog has trackback support, but each of them “shows them differently”, but yet most of the time they work for what they are. Viddler is taking steps to allow trackbacks, perhaps the trackback API would be the next evolutionary step to keeping conversations in one place? We’ll see.

Ok, enough about that – lets address Michael’s next rambling:

One last thought on viddler. While the interface is interesting there’s a lot more to a company than a cool flash interface? look at blip.tv. My fav video blog host. The key to blip’s success thus far is serving the core videoblogging community? which unlike youtube.. wants to have their own domain? their own blog, the ability to monetize? to OWN their own content and have control over it? to not have it deleted or removed because of some arbitrary DMCA notice. Anyway? none of that has to do with a slick interface. It has to do with strategy and architecutre and business direction. Then again.. blip could REALLY stand to have a slick viddler flash interface? maybe the two should partner? of course maybe viddler sees blip as competition. They shouldn’t, but maybe they do.

Lots to chew on here. I’ve been asked several times what I think of “our competition”. I’ve had entire conversations on how so-and-so is “doing this” and why doesn’t Viddler “do that”. This “Us vs. Them” type of attitude (UVTA) can very trapping. In every company I’ve ever been apart of, the UTVA has always been omnipresent. Some have used it in inspirational ways while most of been trapped by it.

When I worked for a securities trading firm it was Us vs. Ameritrade. Constant comparisons between how much Ameritrade “paid per account” and our method of gaining accounts. When I moved onto a sports memorabilia agency it was always Us vs. The Bigger Company. Comparing athlete contracts, etc. Then came 9rules where comparisons between Us and other weblog networks would constantly be drawn. Other weblog networks would even begin to debate the idea of whether or not 9rules should even be considered a weblog network. Talk about worthless chatter. In every case described above there has been some level of balance and imbalance. In one case it may have been one executive of the company that would get completely trapped by the UVTA, while another executive would swoop in and rescue the other. I’ve even seen entire teams get sucked into this line of thinking and begin to lose focus on what they wanted to accomplish. That is the trap.

The point is – the UVTA can be used to either help your company progress or could end up trapping your company from making any progress on its goals because you get sidetracked. Each product is typically built to solve a problem or set of problems. When that focus is lost by trying to keep up competing products, everyone suffers. Especially the original goals set out by the founders of the company/product. The balance of paying attention to your competition and remaining on a course to complete your own goals is very difficult to strike. A moving target sometimes. But not impossible.

After over five-months with Viddler I think they do an incredible job at this balancing act. Does Viddler consider other video sharing sites competition? Perhaps competition for your attention, but not necessarily from a feature or business perspective. Are other video sharing sites doing some things that Viddler should be doing? Absolutely. But here is why comparisons are completely unfair and should never be harped upon too much. Viddler has only been live since December 2006. There are several sites that have been around much longer, have a larger team, and great resources. I’ve never heard these reasons used by the Viddler team as an excuse, or a crutch, to under-perform. But these facts remain.

In other words; Any comparisons drawn between Viddler and any other service will be taken seriously from the standpoint of trying to improve Viddler’s platform. Playing catchup is nearly impossible and Viddler doesn’t consider itself behind the 8-ball. We’ve got our roadmap. Rob Sandie is quite possibly the best product manager I’ve ever met and he’s only 24. Did I mention the service has only been around for 6 months? Go take a look at Viddler again. Dive deep. Six months.

To Michael, thank you very much for jotting down your ramblings. They definitely got me thinking about the next step for Viddler in trying to both revolutionize commenting on the timeline of video – and trying to create seamless conversation. But comparing two services this early on in development is really unfair and getting stuck in that attitude would do more harm than good. The Viddler team is dedicated to helping our Viddlers have the best possible experience using the product envisioned by its founders – and that will continue to be our mantra.

* Most of the “comments” on Chris’ video was him using the comments feature as a way to inject URLs into the timeline of the movie. This is something we are working to fix in a future version of the player that would give the producer of the video the ability to add clickable URLs on the timeline which would, in a way, remove the need to “hack the system” in such a way.

Kyle is doubting the usefulness of Microformats, and is also saying that he thinks the learning curve is too hard because of the documentation making things “too hard”. First I’ll address his comments on the documentation being much too difficult to follow:

“Maybe it’s just me — but I feel like the microformats crew are actively trying to make this an elitest club. I’m not very stupid (I don’t think) but when I first started researching microformats it took me ages to really understand it. It turned out to be dead simple.

You can see the documentation (featured to the right) is quite brief for simple formats like hCard. Wait a second… are you serious? This page is reeee-diculously (and needlessly) long and really needs to be cleaned up. It’s like a giant newbie-scaring-machine. hCard is dead simple to implement; a couple of paragraphs should suffice with two or three examples.”

I could not agree more with Kyle on this. The documentation for Microformats, in reality, is all spec information. There is a definitive need for someone with any type of documentation experience to get on the Microformats Wiki and really make some “Microformats for Dummies” type of documentation.

Someone on Kyle’s comments suggested just getting Jeremy Keith to spear-head the effort. Well, Jeremy is already a microformats “evangelist”, but I can see their point. He has the ability to make things that seem difficult, dead simple. Perhaps he could take some time to edit the heck out of the wiki and/or just add a series of pages explaining each Microformat in human language.

Onto Kyle’s other gripe; the usefulness of Microformats. I disagree with Kyle on this point. Microformats can be, will be, and already are extremely useful. I feel a little weird saying this since I have yet to really take full advantage of Microformats on my site here – but it is definitely in my plans. Kyle didn’t really expound on his reasons why he thinks Microformats are not useful until one of the very last comments that he wrote (he doesn’t have permalinks on his comments so I will copy it here):

“But… again, you seem to have proved my own point with “We haven’t figure out how exactly that will help us” — that’s my entire point. I’ve been following microformats since Tantek was talking about them years ago. An yeah, Tantek is a cool dude… but is it enough of a reason to use them?

I honestly haven’t found it.

I use web standards because it helps me work faster produce more maintainable code and standardize my practices. I can’t say the same for microformats. The best I could say is: “I use microformats so that the extreme minority of my browsers, who have an extension installed, who are looking for specific metadata, who have scripts installed to interact with their other data management applications can more easily add me to their address book.”

Oh, and for those pushing hAtom… the last thing we need in this world is more syndication formats ”

His argument here is really way off. When he says “we haven’t found ways” he really means himself. I think if you ask the folks at Technorati, and the people that have invested millions of dollars into them, they’d disagree with Kyle too. Microformats is just really starting to take off (if people do not use them, they are indeed useless but as more people use them, companies like Technorati can really build useful tools). There is no one definite useage for each Microformat, however each have their own implementation. The biggest advantage I see? One content delivery system for almost any type of data. I don’t need to create a vCard for my about page, I just need to add a few classes to the information that is already there. This brings me to his second point that falls short.

His argument that “…and for those pushing hAtom… the last thing we need in this world is more syndication formats”. Perhaps he hasn’t delved into hAtom much, but it isn’t another syndication format, it literally takes the place of Atom (which is becoming increasingly popular and is starting to become the syndication format of choice of some of the larger companies that have tons of data to syndicate [ see Nail Kennedy's article about feed syndication formats and their usage]). Also something to remember is the hAtom is currently in draft format, but imagine if if you had a blog and you didn’t need to serve an HTML version, RSS 0.92, RSS 2, and Atom version of your site. You could just serve the HTML version and all of the data you wish to syndicate – to different applications and services, could be parsed from that single delivery system. This is the biggest advantage of Microformats in my opinion.

The documentation does need a serious look, and update, to make it a much less steep learning curve. Broader usage will come of that, and in turn more uses will reveal themselves from a growing user base. I suppose Kyle’s post really cuts right down to the root of the Microformats problem – explain them better, and they’ll be used.

[tags]microformats, kyle neath, tantek Çelik, jeremy keith, hcard, hatom, rss, atom, feeds, syndication, technorati, html[/tags]
[slug]re-microformats-useful[/slug]

The first thing I’m going to tackle is Safari (though I believe that Safari should be updated as a separate application and not part of the OS). I’ll try to focus my thoughts from fixes, to actual bugs, to feature requests.

Fixes

The following are not “bugs” in the traditional sense. I believe that most of the following was done intentionally, I just do not think they should have been done.

Setting your default browser is currently held within Safari’s preference panel. This “feature” definitely gets on the nerves of many and really I can’t figure out why this resides in here. In order to switch from Safari to Firefox you’d need to first open Safari and tell it you want Firefox to be the default browser.

This isn’t to say that Firefox (and other browsers) do not ask if you’d like to use them as the default browser on your system – but this does not mean that this is the proper location for this preference. What if I uninstalled Safari?

The blue RSS button at the top of the browser is fairly misleading. Apple is attempting to “brand” a doc-spec. In other words, they are saying that all “feeds” are RSS. Obviously this is not true. I do not want that icon to change from RSS to ATOM to “WHATEVER” when it applies, I’d much rather see Apple use the unified feed icons to go along with the unified feed theory (another post I have to bring over to my local site soon).

Multiple feeds detection kinda goes along with the above. I suppose this could be filed under a new feature request – but I feel like they might have kept it simple on purpose. I wouldn’t mind seeing a short list pop up with the available feeds for that site. Obviously this would only be useful if web masters actually listed these feeds in their documents.

Feature requests

Safari is definitely a browser for the average user, but I’d like to see a few of the “not so elementary” features from other browsers find their way into the Leopard release of Safari. Why? Because I’d much rather use Safari than Firefox if it only had the following.

Bookmark keywords (click to zoom)

Bookmark keywords is something I use heavily in Firefox. I am not sure how widely used this feature actually is, since even browsers like Flock do not currently have this feature built in (and Flock is built off of the same engine and core as Firefox). Side note: I’ve been told that Flock 1.0 (due out sooner than later) will have these features as it will be built off of the Firefox 2.0 release.

To explain really quick, for those that are not familiar with this feature – Bookmark keywords allow you to setup shortcuts for your bookmarks. Let’s say that you had a rather long URL that you visited often, and you didn’t want to traverse your long list of bookmarks in order to get to that page without typing in the name manually, you can setup a shorter keyword for that. (see screenshot) You type in that keyword, and poof, you’re there.

Searchable history is not something I use every day, but when you need it – you find it very handy. I suppose I could liken a searchable history to Spotlight. Before Spotlight was introduced we never knew how much of a pain it was to find things on our local system. But, after having Spotlight for awhile now, I find it indispensable. Such is the case with searchable history. Safari’s history menu is crude – and needs a significant update.

Update: As Nathan pointed out the history in Safari is indeed searchable. But I would have never found it if he hadn’t told me where it was. So the UI needs to be adjusted to make this much more accessible.

Final thoughts

Really my requests for Safari are very light and don’t hold a ton of water when it comes to my decision to use Firefox instead of Safari. There are other, underlying, reasons why I use Firefox that are much more “under the hood” type of reasons. For instance, many WYSIWYG editors inside of various web applications do not function properly within Safari. Hopefully, with the very latest version of Web kit no doubt being included in the upcoming release of Safari, we’ll see some of this functionality made available.

I remember the first day I wanted to jump ship from Safari to Firefox. I wanted to use Google Calendar and couldn’t because Safari was not a supported browser. But now that I rarely use any online web applications – I may switch back and deal with my little niggles mentioned above until they become available (hopefully) in the next release.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]leopard, mac os x, osx, macintosh, apple, safari, wish list, browsers, flock, firefox, bookmarks, history, rss, feeds, atom[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt1-safari[/slug]