Feed Readers Evolve

It's been a few years since there was much exciting news around feed readers--software that allows users to collect and display content feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. One early leader in the technology, Pluck, even shut down their reader product in January 2007 in order to refocus the business on social media. Nevertheless, newsreaders are an interesting concept with the potential to dramatically shift control from publishers to users, once again underscoring the democratic nature of the web.

Some recent innovations are starting to make the newsreader space interesting again by finding alternatives to the uninviting unstructured, text-centric approach that characterized these products in the early days. A few examples:

MSNBC's Spectra: This beta product blows the doors off the visually boring scroll of text that had become synonymous with feed readers or, as MSNBC's marketers put it, "merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum." Surprise, the colorful, animated interface turns out to be functional as well as fun. News categories are color-coded, you can save articles to read later (must be online), and there's keyword search. A significant limit to the current product is that it's essentially a front door to the MSNBC news service; you can't add feeds from other sources. Spectra is a free and web-based.

TalkingNews: TalkingNews, also a beta, decouples the newsreader from text entirely: it uses text-to-speech technology to turn RSS and Atom feeds into simulated podcasts. You can also add your favorite podcasts to your TalkingNews reader. There are four voice options for hearing your feeds. The audio files are downloadable so, like conventional podcasts, they're available offline. TalkingNews is web-based. Basic membership, limited to two channels of two feeds each (max 60 minutes of audio per day), is free, or you can upgrade to a $19.99 annual subscription that offers ten channels of ten feeds.

PressDisplay, a Canadian company, offers a configurable viewer to organize and read news content from over 600 newspapers around the world. There's a mobile version as well as a text-to-speech option, "Newspaper Radio." You can filter content by language as well as on a spectrum from user favorites to editors' choices. You can select content from PressDisplay's many news sources, but can't add personal favorite feeds. PressDisplay is web-based, but there's a downloadable PressReader that allows offline access. There are three subscription options ranging from a limited free plan to unlimited access for $29.95 per month.

Interesting Mobile-Related Web Sites

I've been increasingly involved with mobile projects lately, as this platform rapidly matures into a full-featured medium for social interaction, information, and commerce. That's led to a couple of interesting web sites that throw light on where mobile technology is headed. If they're not already on your radar, they're worth checking out:

1) Nokia's MOSH: Nokia started this very Web 2.0 content sharing site specifically for mobile content--audio, video, text, games, software, and images. The good news: it's not limited to content for Nokia handsets; the aim is to facilitate sharing content on all mobile devices. I like the focus on content across media types, as well as the assumption that mobile is a central platform for consuming as wide a variety of content as the PC. Added to Nokia's acquisiton of Mobile OS company Symbian, the MOSH initiative makes it clear Nokia wants to provide much more than handsets in the mobile future.

2) Alcatel-Lucent's Teen Lab blog: Telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent spends a significant amount each year studying the global youth market for mobile technology, in an effort to uncover and understand important trends. The Teen Lab team summarizes findings and links to interesting related content in their official blog. In addition to the mobile-specific observations, the site is interesting for its insights into the behavior and preferences of teens, the "market of the future." Alcatel-Lucent knows research; the company is the current owner of the historic Bell Labs research facility.

How to Be the Best Web 2.0 Developer

One of the sites I blog for is my friend Silvia Bassi’s CW Connect, a community for IT and telecom professionals in Brazil. Today a computer science student in the community asked what core skills are most valuable for developers aiming to work in the Web 2.0 environment. I’m a business person, not an engineer, so I passed the question to Joe Kleinschmidt, the CTO of Leverage Software—an online community software and services company that provides the CW Connect platform.

Joe promptly sent back a thoughtful response that I’ll share here, for the benefit both of aspiring Web 2.0 developers as well as managers who are building teams to actualize Web 2.0 product or business visions.

CTO Joe Kleinschmidt’s advice for building the most valuable skillset possible for the Web 2.0 world:

“Wow, quite an interesting question! Well, because technology tends to move so quickly--today's Ruby is tomorrow's FORTRAN--I typically find it's much more important to develop skills which span across technologies. For me the most important skills fall under the following headings:

• Communication. Web 2.0 applications today are designed by interdisciplinary teams, distributed across the globe, for a set of demanding customers, in a rapidly-changing industry. Thus, the best web developers I've ever worked with are outstanding at communication--both technical and nontechnical. Technical communication is frequently visual, so I recommend developers learn how to read and write architecture diagrams, data models, object models, UML--things that tend to cross language boundaries. Of course nontechnical communication is equally important. There is no substitute for elegant writing and speaking skills to convey an idea to a customer, partner, or colleague.
• Architecture. Web 2.0 applications are all about scale. Great developers understand--at their core--how an app will work when millions of people are using it. Learning about performance, stress-testing, being able to write simple, loosely-coupled apps that can be distributed across multiple servers at multiple locations is a tremendous skill. Great developers can "see" (and avoid) bottlenecks in code right out of the gate.
• Design. Call it the iPod effect: so many products succeed wildly because they are elegantly designed and a joy to use. Some developers think that usability and design "isn't their job," but I've found that the best web developers tend to have enough of an eye to know when something "feels right." Developing that creative intuition--whether through an art class, usability seminars, or anything--means that great designers will simply find it easier to work with you, which in turn means you're more likely to work on beautiful (and successful) products."
  

Great information Joe! One other thought: it’s helpful to have some insight into the business mindset as well. A course or two in economics, finance, or marketing can open the door on how and why business goals and priorities are set (maybe there’s a reason they’re counting those beans). That can facilitate getting everyone on the same page and aligning resources, efforts, and objectives. Especially in such a fast-evolving and competitive environment as Web 2.0, the more efficient the organization, the better the odds of success.

Are there other skills we should add to the list? Leave a comment with your thoughts.