Rivers
Yesterday I announced that I had put up my river of news publicly. I have been using it quite a bit, even transitioning a lot of my feeds over to it and I’ve realized just how handy something like this is. It’s interesting news that most times I would just “Mark as Read” in Google-Reader, but now I can actually scan it at will.
Dave Winer has been running various Rivers of his own and claims that this is how he most likes to consume news. For me the River is a way to filter noise out of my standard reading lists that I still subscribe to via the old fashioned RSS.
Rarst mentioned to me that to him the SPEED of the river isn’t as important as the content flowing through it. Granted he isn’t a fan of Rivers in general, but the idea is valid. My River is never going to be as interesting as your river, and Dave’s river is probably the most interesting to Dave. So why not a web service that allows users to churn out their own Rivers. So that’s the plan for June. Create a private-beta service that allows users to create their own Rivers.
Notes
I’m in the process of launching a simple web-app that will allow you to create/manage/publish “notes”. Essentially you would open up the app, log in and then you could create notes. You could create “folders” to manage these notes and of course, you can “publish” them to receive a unique url that is publicly accessible. You can also subscribe to a users public feed notifying you of updates.
This web app stemmed from the need for a single interface to manage all the notes/writing I do on the computer. Normally, when I answer the phone, I pop open notepad to take down notes. When I think of a new idea or concept I write it all up and then either forget where I wrote it or delete it so that I can keep thinking about it. To me, notes are very fluid. Sometimes, I need to share the notes I create with other users, to get their input.
So, I created the web app. Hopefully, this month I’ll be able to finish up with branding and add the public notes feature. You’ll know that it’s ready to officially enter private beta when I transition my blog over from Posterous to a new system that is either completely powered by, or consumes the content provided by this new note application.
