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04 Sep 2011 16:42

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Tech: Is now the time to ditch your RSS feed? Possibly.

  • That’s what Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng suggests. “RSS was essentially created so that Internet users could stay up-to-date with every single posting made on a particular website,” she writes. “This was, of course, back in the day when every site on earth didn’t post 150 new stories per day, and your friend’s blog feed didn’t contain 60 cross-posted Twitter musings to crowd out the one real post per week.” We’re with her. Despite the fact that we follow a lot of news, keeping up with the grindy nature of an RSS feed is an exercise in force-feeding, and one a lot of people simply don’t have time for. In fact, just 6 percent of Internet users use RSS regularly, and somehow the other 94 percent don’t miss out on too much. We love our RSS readers, but if you choose to follow us on Twitter instead, we totally understand. Because we go months without actually checking into Google Reader, and days without checking into Pulse, because we already caught the important stuff on Twitter already. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Jun 2010 00:28

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Tech: Limp Pulse: New York Times Company screws with awesome iPad app

  • The Pulse app is better than the NYT app. There, we said it. The New York Times didn’t put all of this money and time into an iPad app to see their hard work upstaged by a couple of upstarts. Which is why the Times’ lawyers sent Apple an angry letter asking them to pull the Pulse app – which Steve Jobs had big-upped just yesterday – because of the way it uses their RSS feeds. Apple took it down, and now it’s back up. But these guys have had a pretty miraculous ride. Some quick tidbits on that ride:
  • four number of weeks the app was developed by two Stanford students
  • #1 the app’s peak on the “paid apps” chart since its fairly recent release
  • yes the app has gotten a big wet kiss of a profile in the Times already source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

31 May 2010 21:57

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Tech: WHOA: Pulse is officially the coolest iPad news-reader, ever

  • We want to have babies with this RSS reader. OK, maybe not babies, but definitely some sort of spawn. Our statistics meet your cool little boxes in a dark room somewhere, and things might happen. After all, you’re my wonderwall. (Thanks TechCrunch for the tip. This $3.99 pile of awesome, created by a bunch of recent Stanford grads, is totally worth it.) source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 1 Comment • Permalink

21 Dec 2009 11:25

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Tech: RSS pioneer: Google Reader (and other products) failed RSS

  • It wouldn’t make you smarter, happier, worth more, have more friends, get laid more often, go to heaven or become a saint. Reading every story is a meaningless concept.
  • RSS co-inventor Dave Winer • Discussing how the syndication technology has been interpreted all wrong by feed readers, specifically Google Reader. The programs are designed like e-mail programs, which has had the end effect of making it so you’re encouraged to read everything, like e-mail. Winer continues, saying that Twitter has essentially nailed down the news-reading model RSS was trying for. “Twitter found a way to put both the authoring tool and the reading tool on the home page. Had I cracked that nut in 2002,” he says, “Twitter might have happened a few years earlier.” source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 4 Comments • Permalink

15 Nov 2009 02:09

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About: A quick shout-out to our RSS readers: Hey guys!

  • If you didn’t know … … you can read ShortFormBlog’s posts without ever having to visit the site. We have a full-featured RSS feed with hundreds of readers that offers an experience that matches the bite-sized nature of the site. Numbers, photos, quotes, videos and so on show up on the feed. It looks particularly good in Google Reader. source
  • If you didn’t know … … you can read ShortFormBlog’s posts without ever having to visit the site. We have a full-featured RSS feed with hundreds of readers that offers an experience that matches the bite-sized nature of the site. Numbers, photos, quotes, videos and so on show up on the feed. It looks particularly good in Google Reader.
  • On recent issues Over the last few weeks, we’ve had some significant problems with our feed – both under the hood and above the hood. We admittedly worked really hard to get that feed in good shape, so this is frustrating. Please e-mail us if you find any further problems with that or anything else on the site. We appreciate it greatly. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Jul 2009 15:28

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Tech: An unabashed plug for an RSS reader: Meet Feedly, brahs.

feedly0702
  • As you might know about us at ShortFormBlog, we’re not against the occasional plug for something we really dig. And in this case, Feedly, which mashes up Google Reader into a very easy-to-read format, totally deserves it. Like other Web products we’ve liked in the past, such as Apture (who likes us back, apparently), it has this way of carrying itself like it the Internet should have always been this way. We like giving nods to cool things like this. Makes life easier – especially when it comes to tweeting links.source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Jun 2009 10:20

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About: Friendly reminder of the ways you can follow us online

  • Great news! We recently switched to a Facebook page – great for those who want news while defacing their boyfriend’s wall.
  • We also added a new FriendFeed account. Don’t know FriendFeed? Well, they’re like the Velvet Underground of social networking.
  • And as we’re sure you may know, we have a Twitter account that we update several times a day. Yes, we swear, we actually have a life.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
 
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