Feedly

The announced July 1st shutdown of Google Reader this past Wednesday sent me into a bit of a tizzy. Google Reader is a very convenient way to track web site updates. I've been using RSS, the underlying technology for Google Reader, since it was introduced in the late 1990s.

RSS originally stood for Really Simple Syndication. The idea behind RSS is to make a web site's content available for aggregation by any program capable of reading RSS. Obviously, sites may not want to syndicated full articles but only article extracts or headlines. You find all three.

RSS is an incredibly efficient way of tracking the content of multiple web sites, and Google had really invested a lot over the years improving its infrastructure to make its own tracking of RSS as efficient as possible. Google Reader was a nice side-effect of that effort.

But, the truth of the matter is that Reader's interface had become neglected over the past couple of years. Google had even resorted to ripping features out of Reader in favor of Google Plus, their flagship social network.

Google Plus doesn't really hack it for tracking website updates.

So, the past couple of days I've been evaluating non-Google alternatives to Reader. The one I like so far is Feedly. It uses Google's feed infrastructure, something that will have to change before Google shuts it down.

Here's a list of the feedly positives:

• Very fast loading.
• A compact, attractive display of headlines. It just hammers every other alternative with this feature alone.
• Great iOS apps that really facilitate skimming headlines and quickly accessing content. It's a joy to use on iOS.
• Well implemented sharing in the web interface, with a bit of an exception for Google Plus.

Here are some areas where feedly needs work:

• Sharing to Google Plus from iOS. Feedly defaults to the web interface. To be fair, Google has only recently opened up the API for doing this directly without having to go through the web.
• Sharing to Google Plus is also slightly flaky from Feedly's web interface. The text box for inputting your commentary has a tendency to flicker out.

Things any of these feed readers will have to do to attract me long term:

• Convince me they have a business model. For instance, how does Feedly make money? Unclear.
• Provide me a way to leave by exporting my feeds.

A few thoughts on ebooks circa December 2010

This post is inspired by Tracy Crawford's recent buzz about the imminent arrival of Google books. Her husband is one of the high level people at Google involved in that product. My own interest is mainly as a consumer. As an academic, I can buy thousands of dollars worth of books a year. One year, about a decade ago, I totaled $2000 on technical books. Fortunately, I had a grant to pay for it.

Lately, I've been getting into ebooks. It's a way to carry your library everywhere, and they're often dramatically cheaper. I've migrated from the iPad and iBooks to aldiko and kindle on my Android phone. Recently, I bought the kindle to improve the reading experience. It works well with both drm'd and non-drm'd content even though it's restricted to mobi and pdf.

The sum of my experience is that the kindle hardware offers by far the best reading experience of all of these platforms. Couple that with kindle's software support on multiple platforms and Amazon has packaged up an unparalleled electronic reading experience that requires very little effort on the user's part.

Here are the parts of that experience that particularly impress me:

• Having access to your library anywhere is wonderful.
• Having multiple device support for your library is wonderful, particularly if you can get advanced features like color on devices that support it.
• Being able to sync your reading location in specific books across devices is great.

Right now, the kindle only offers full support for these features for books you buy from Amazon. This doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me. Yes, there's lock-in, but you can also make the case that book revenues are needed to support the infrastructure. Further, for how long is there lock-in really? For instance, I read pleasure books and basically throw them away. References for specific products are really only worth keeping for a year or so until the products become out of date.

There are a few technical and theoretical references that I've kept for decades. But, those are the exception, not the rule. For the general throwaway reading I do, DRM and proprietary platforms (as long as they're cheap and ubiquitous) are not the issue.

Getting an iPad for Dad, Part 1

So, I did purchase an iPad for Dad for his birthday yesterday. Well, it wasn't exactly me who did the purchasing; I sent my wife because I knew I would not be able to resist the call of the device in the actual store. Nonetheless, I did do the setup and a couple of experiments to satisfy my curiosity about some features that would play a role in my own decision. Here's the low down on the setup and my first impressions:

• You have to sync with iTunes to start. Like Amazon's Kindle, a big part of this device's raison d'etre is to sell things to you, most particularly media.
  
• What if you don't have iTunes? Dad doesn't. I had to spend some time strategizing how to deal with this. I wound up "faking" an iTunes account for him by creating an account on one of my computers. In so doing, I also created a gmail account for him so that Apple could communicate with him about his iTunes account.
  
• If you buy eBooks from someone other than Amazon or Apple, you have to move them to the iPad via iTunes. This is about on par with mailing them to yourself on the Kindle and then downloading them.
• Dad was never part of the touch type generation and age has only made that worse. The onscreen keyboard was not going to be an option. The wireless ($69) keyboard is actually really good. I recommend that everyone get that with the case. With those accessories, the iPad turns into a super spiffy netbook.
  
• You must have a great network connection to get any value out of the iPad. On purpose, there's no iPad file system for programs to use in storing your files and documents. Therefore, almost all of the apps derive their value from connecting you to some web information resource. Even Apple's iWork suite depends on a network connection to move files back and forth to the web.
  

This last point is insidious and will play a major role in Part 2 of my review.

Also, I should come clean. In spite of the issues to tackle that I've listed here, I'm quite infatuated by the device and will almost certainly get one.

A few thoughts regarding eBooks

I consume a lot of books. I remember one year totaling $2000 in books that I was able to expense to my employer. That was less than half my total for the year. Further, the books don't stay on my shelf. I actively delete ones that are no good or of waning interest due to space considerations.

Needless to say, you might think I'd be in the market for an eReader, and I've definitely considered them all. But they've all fallen short. The issue has not been whether the format is open or DRMed, though I do find the notion that you could buy a book that one day you couldn't read due to technological obsolescence a bit remarkable. It's not that way with paper. As long as the sun shines and you can still see, reading is possible.

No, the issue has been usability.

And, it's not the kind of usability where I see the page moving with my finger.

Rather it boils down to the following:

• The eBooks I want to read (from publishers like O'Reilly) are priced at a significant premium relative to their paper counterparts. Amazon typically discounts tech books by 40%. O'Reilly typically discounts its eBooks by 10% to 20%. In other words, O'Reilly is actually charging extra for the cheaper to produce format. That's not so galling in and of itself, except when you are painfully reminded that eBooks are the inferior product on a few dimensions.
• eBooks are not three dimensional. A big part of how I navigate a book is by remembering about how far in certain topics were. Then, I begin scanning. If it's a new topic, this may be the only way to find things since I will not remember the exact technical terms used by the author for keyword search.
  
• The artifacts produced by reading an eBook device don't sufficiently aid retrieval. A big part of the reading process for me is transforming the physical book into a memory cue for things I want to come back to later. That process involves writing lots of margin notes , turning down page corners, and drawing big arrows.

Publishing is an archaic term that people should just drop

I've been reading Tom Foremski's Silicon Valley Watcher blog. Tom is an old FT reporter who now consults to the publishing industry on strategies for dealing with the new media.

I find Tom's blog very intellectually stimulating. The problem is, I think he's got it all wrong. Publishing is increasingly something people don't do anymore. Instead, it's being replaced by three distinct, separable activities:

• Distribution
  
• Content Production
  
• Curation
  

It's easy to give examples of major offerings in each of these. For instance, twitter is clearly a distribution channel as is, for the most part, google buzz. Blogger, typepad, and wordpress are content production platforms. Delicious and google reader are examples of curation platforms.

If you want to become what Tom would call a publisher these days, you don't set out to become a monolith combining all three. Instead, you figure out how to source all three, often working with multiple partners in each category.