« Things that make you go hmm.... | Main | Somerville on the Web »
July 01, 2003
Subscriptions Harmonizer
It looks like Dave is thinking about a world where desktop aggregators can sync their subscriptions lists with a central server
The proposed api looks good. A minor question is whether the subscribe() and unsubscribe() methods should use strings instead of arrays. Strings agree more with the language that subscribing and unsubscribing are done one feed at a time. But the backend may be simpler to code if we always deal with arrays. No big deal, I think it will work fine either way.
This will be a huge usability leap, and will make me happy, for one. Excellent!
Posted by Andrew Grumet at July 1, 2003 03:28 PM
| TrackBack
| Cosmos
The API doesn't seem to deal with tracking which articles a subscriber has actually read. To me this seems like the biggest usability issue in having multiple aggregators on different PC's. Syncing the list of subscribed feeds is somewhat of a hassle, but not nearly as much as trying to figure out what you've read on one vs. the other. Although I have a two PC's (work vs. home) and both with a SharpReader setup, I often end up just reading my stuff on one in the end.
This would seem to greatly extend the amount of data the harmonizer would need to manage for each user, but seems worth it given the utility it would offer to end users.
-Kris
Posted by: Kristofer Goss at July 16, 2003 10:51 AMI agree.
Posted by: Andrew Grumet at July 16, 2003 11:03 AM