Thanks to Mat for calling me on the lack of clarity in my idea post. I realize that it ended up being a bit more of a brain dump and much less of a coherent project idea. I’ve found that I’ve been able to sell the idea pretty well in person, but text is a much more difficult medium for me.
So here’s the quick pitch:
Native iPhone application for one site/blog (e.g. The Sartorialist) which leverages all the great features of an RSS reader, can be used offline, supports comments, and most importantly has an interface which is tailored to the content.
If the major contents of the site are images, then the interface should give the user the tools to browse through them in a way suited to images, not to the the generic RSS format.
Is that more clear?
September 25th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
I agree with the concept- that the barrier to finding all the RSS feeds is too high for a majority of the people who would use a nice reader. THere must be a way to do it better. The iPhone is a great platform to have a light-weight reader to prod you on to targeted surphing (esp if you have limited time).
My idea is this- there is one thing that people already have. One thing that is ready to use- their bookmarks.
We need an app that can simply take all your bookmarks (so there would be a small desktop component to the iPhone app) from any browser, then just spider then and intelligently ferret our the RSS feeds for each one, and assemble them into your iReader app. Boom, done. No fuss no muss.
This, I think, would be a big boon to many people.
Having a commenting feature would be a bonus.
See socialbrowse
September 26th, 2008 at 7:00 am
So you’re talking about building an aggregator/news reader of some sort, but making the subscription process easier, right?
Sounds kind of interesting. You’d still have to sell people on the idea of an aggregator, though, and it wouldn’t address the issue of content and interface. I like the idea, although I think it hits a more technically savvy group of people than I’m targeting.