What makes a feedreader work

For the last couple years i’ve been using bloglines as my feedreader. It’s not perfect, but it works, it does what i want, displays new news, it’s easy to add new feeds via a bookmarklet, and manage my subscriptions. The interface is clunky, but simple.

I’ve tried other readers such as rojo but somehow they all failed to provide a basic show me what is new, let me easily read it. So the interface issue is important. Without it, it’s not worth using.

This morning i came across pluck (via), a more ajaxy reader which has browser plugins to use the sidebars. It looks very pretty. But upon installing it, and importing my feeds from bloglines, it failed to be able to parse most of my feeds.

It just didn’t work on a more fundamental level, it didn’t read feeds.

The thing which kellan has been telling me for a while. Bloglines works not because of the interface, but really because it is very good at reading feeds. There is custom built c regex feed parser which just strips out the useful parts of the feeds and libcurl is used to pull in the feeds as efficiently as possible.

It’s interesting when the critical feature which distinguishes a site is something which you don’t see right away. Does it work really well on the back end, pulling in information. It’s a critical component to making a working network app, yet a lot of the ajax hype has focused on the surface, the interface. The other major part is the web services. The ability to share the underlying data and services programatically so people can build their own new creations. It’s a network web version of the virtuous cycle which the free software community build up with linux, gnu, and the gpl license.

One of the comments on the ajaxian blog claims that pluck fails in that regard as well. I don’t use bloglines api’s but I’m glad they are there. The existence is very important, because it makes a declaration of where power lies, and where innovation will happen.

This community of innovation is part of the critical mass which will ensure the ongoing success and growth of rails. It’s both useful and cool, but it’s also a space which draws in more innovators in to the mix.