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I spend a lot of time thinking about bringing feed reading to a wider audience. A sobering statistic is that the overwhelming majority of web users, upwards of 95%, have no knowledge of the technology or how it can help them stay on top of content they're interested in.
One of the larger obstacles to adoption has been the lack of a consistent, user friendly mechanism for identifying and subscribing to feeds on the web. A widely adopted auto-discovery markup convention and browser integration have improved the experience dramatically. Publishers now have a mechanism by which they can provide the user with notification that feeds are available. However, in practice, current implementations can give confusing results. This is due largely to the LINK tag convention suffering from the classic invisible metadata problem: data that is out of sight easily falls into disrepair. Broken links, duplicate feeds, and invalid or poorly written titles are common in LINK tags and lead to ambiguous results like this:
There are two distinct feeds associated with this web page, and no good way to differentiate them using the metadata provided in the LINK tags. This is inconvenient for the advanced user and downright confusing for the novice.
Flock attempts to improve this situation by fetching and parsing feeds mentioned in LINK tags in the background as you browse. This lets us validate the feeds, get authoritative rather than secondhand metadata, and gives us the opportunity to use more advanced deduping techniques to provide the user with a more relevant selection:
The end result is a more consistent feed subscription experience on the wild, wild web.
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Other Systems & Languages
That's nice, but isn't it bad for the webmasters who get fake stats and more bandwidth consumption? Why don't you use the Bloglines API?
Hi Alberto A-P,
Which Blogline API are you referring to? Can you give an example how it relates to feed discovery?
webmasters: This seems like a thoughtful, practical solution to a real work problem. What do you recommend instead? Is the solution worse than feeds being invisible to people?
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All the best to you,
Lloyd D Budd
Flock QA (Qommunity and quality Assurance)
Personal blog / http://foolswisdom.com/~lloyd
That's really cool. Keep up the good work.
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BTW, I'm a huuuuuuuuuuge Firefox fan (been using it since 0.2), I'm currently trying out Flock. I love the Feed Reader and The Bookmark Top Bar.
So Bear with me please.
Sohil
Do you guys plan to have integration of Social RSS Feeding. I've never heard of anything like it but I was thinking it would be nice to have my feeds transfer accross my computers and share with friends like my del.icious bookmarks. The closest thing I found was the Pluck RSS Reader(http://www.pluck.com/products/rss-reader.html)
Lloyd, he means that you're fetching the feed without actually subscribing to it, meaning a wider adoption of Flock might equal more requests within someone's access logs that weren't legitimate reads.
I don't know anything about the Bloglines API, but I can assume that he means there is some way to pull a description of the feed with the kinds of details you need via a Bloglines query, thereby not incurring extra hits from the site's server.
Of course, if Bloglines is unavailable, then you could do as you do currently as a fallback. Since you should be using Bloglines for the reader anyway [nudge wink grin] I think it's worth investigation.
Actually Pete and Manish implimented it using caching, so it only requests a given feed url once.
(off topic these drupal pages are SOOOO frustrating... I go to comment andit says my name belongs to a registered user but I have NO way of logging in. :( )
Hi there, i just dont know where to comment this, but i find the way the news are displayed REALLY anoying, what i mean is the sidebar actually MOVES all my tabs to a side! that is really unnatural for me, usually a sidebar just moves the CONTENT of the site to a side (wich is OK since its taking that space) but moving the ENTIRE thing to a side is really anoying, it interferes with my browsing experience, specially since i tend to read a little then continue browsing, and changing windows actually CHANGES my tabs positions (well, they just stretch)so i have to RELEARN them.
wouldnt it be nicer to have something more in the line of favorites? there, the sidebar is INSIDE the rendering window, not making everything else wacky.
well just that, i LOVE flock so much that i actually helped in the translation to es-AR ;)
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