Rojo mojo
After an invite from Allen Searls, I was able to register for Rojo, almost exactly when they announced their own launch. S0 far I really like it.
When I first started using a web-aggregator, which is where I do my primary RSS consumption, since my company’s firewall won’t let any desktop clients (that I’ve found) through, I started with MyFeedster. I had taken a look at BlogLines but didn’t like the interface, since what I really wanted was a reverse-chronological list of items to review.
Feedster worked really well for me for a while, and I was pretty vocal about UI concerns and had several extended IM chats with Scott Johnson about suggestions and bugs I found.
Once I expanded beyond 100 feeds or so MyFeedster no longer worked for me - since there was (and is) no way to mark an item as read, and due to an unfortunate confluence of feedster’s crawling/caching algorithms and the timing of RSS updates, I would end up looking at the same stuff over and over againi trying to find the new stuff. Since MyFeedster sorts by posted-time, I would end up with items I hadn’t read yet appearing way down my page, under stuff I hadn’t read, because feedster got to some of the newer items before some of the older ones.
Once MyFeedster became too cumbersome I swithced to BlogLines (though I still use feedster heavily when searching for posts, which is what I think they really want to excel at anyway). BlogLines offered me the ability never to look at an item twice unless I specifically chose to. I also gave me the option of sorting my feeds into larger buckets for better organization.
This worked really well for me until I exceeded 250 feeds or so, which is when the required action of clicking back and forth from feed to feed became overwhelming. To be honest, there was a little bit of stress involved in my BlogLines window as well - looking at that list of feeds and the 4000+ unread items was more than just daunting, it was almost terrifying. I felt as though I was being disloyal to the bloggers I wasn’t keeping up with. I found myself reading mostly the bloggers that are often referred to as ‘A’ listers because it was too hard to choose what to read. Do I read Jessamyn at librarian.net, with 35 unread items or Hugh at gapingvoid with 85? Argh!
Then Steve Gillmor started talking up Rojo in a big way and I was eager to get my hands on it. Thus my apparent frustration in my last post on the subject. Now that I’m in, though, I’m really excited.
Rojo offers the best of both the structured [BlogLines] and feed-stream [MyFeedster] approaches to RSS consumption. Someone there must read blogs like I do, because for right now they’ve got it just right. I can view the entirety of my feedlist as a reverse-chron stream (conveniently taking away any pressure for seeing that list of unread items). Then if I want to drill down into one feed I can expand the sidebar and voilà, I can see my feed-folders and get to the one I want.
In addition to the RSS mojo (thus [R][ojo]), there’s also a lot of potential attention.xml mojo on the horizon for Rojo. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, and since I’m still working on deeply grokking attention I may be wrong, but it seems that Rojo wants to leverage the attention potential in any case, which could mean a lot of really good things in store for Rojo users.
Great work Rojo-folk!
RSS 2
