I would really love someone to build a better news aggregator. If I weren’t already up to my eyeballs in projects, I’d do it myself. I no longer use Radio for my blog, because it’s a memory leaking, bloated application that slowly brings most systems to a halt. I just got tired of rebooting. However, the news aggregator feature is just about perfect. It can run as a web accessible service, so I can access it from anywhere, and on any machine, and it keeps track of things I’ve read. These are two features I’ve grown to love, and that aren’t included in most other news aggregators.
After bouncing some ideas off Ken, he had another great suggestion, along the lines of GMail… why throw out RSS articles at all? Hard drive space is cheap, it would be cool to archive them, and make them searchable. Here’s my dream news reader:
- – Cross Platform (Windows, Mac, Linux)
– Accessible via the web (password protected, of course)
– Keeps all articles grouped by site, and ordered by date/time
– Tracks “read” articles and doesn’t display them after they are deleted/archived
– Archives “read” posts, for searching later
– Supports RSS (.9x, 1.0, 2.0) and ATOM
I would pay for that news aggregator… I really would, and I think others would too.
Kleio pointed me to an new service called Bloglines which is an on-line news reader, and has many of the features I was asking for… I’ve signed up for an account, and I’m going to be giving it a try this week. I hope it’s cool!
Bloglines actually does a lot of that. It’s web-based. It doesn’t archive RSS articles automatically, but you can “save” them into searchable folders. And it’s free!