Suzi Wells writes:

I find that with RSS readers that tell me how many stories I have not read, it’s like a game where I want to keep the count to zero. So I was thinking this morning that what I would like is an RSS reader that doesn’t tell me how many stories I haven’t read, but will pick me out a coffee-break’s worth at random (probably about 3) from my unread stories. Something more like a Last.fm radio station.(Link)

Aha! A scenario we can do something about. We took a decision early on to make a “river” style aggregator rather than a “mail” style aggregator. So all the stories are mixed into one big feed with no unread counter. And the number that make it into the river are configured by sliding the “volume” control.

So maybe Suzi can use FeedForward one day…

I think I mentioned in a previous post that one of the inspirations for the FF interaction model was Userland Radio. So it shouldn’t be that surprising that a new product from Dave Winer has a lot in common with FF. FlickrFan is an online photo tool that pulls in photofeeds from Flickr, backs them up on your own computer, and offers a simple drag-and-drop approach to publishing and sharing new photos.

If we (or anyone else) added a Flickr conduit you’d have a reasonable match for the features of FlickrFan in FeedForward. (The reason I haven’t coded one so far is that coding for Flickr authentication is a bit of a chore). However, just like Radio, FlickrFan runs as a local webserver you access on the local loop, rather than a standalone regular desktop application. That has some different pros and some cons.

Anyway, its an interesting product idea and has generated some press. And some relief that what we’ve been doing in FF isn’t totally mad. The link between FlickrFan and a Mac Mini HDTV controller also raises the interesting concept of the FF core logic as part of a particular internet device rather than purely a rich Internet application (RIA) for your laptop or desktop. Hmm.

Just about the worst thing that can happen in the sprint for a major release milestone – you can’t see the server all your precious code is sat on. Has it been switched off? Has it crashed? Has the firewall blocked it? Is our code still OK?

Hopefully it’ll be up again in the morning.

Don’t panic!!!

(For progess so far, see the roadmap.