- hiding read articles
- showing the whole article instead of just a snippet
- ability to email articles
- more interaction with peers, e.g. via an article commenting feature
Our implementation is unusual in the feed reader world. Instead of just showing the full feed text, we launch another window and show the whole blog page in a frame, with controls at the top of the page. We chose this design for several reasons, the main one being that it provides the reader with not only the whole article, but also access to the comments on the article. Most other feed readers like Google Reader don't allow you to read comments along with articles, meaning you often miss the best part of a dialogue. Some aggregators like Friendfeed try to pull the dialogue into their own system. While this is tempting, this makes it harder to track the overall dialogue around an article because comments are now happening in multiple places. Another advantage of our approach is you get to see the actual web page instead of just the text in the feed, so if the page has interesting content in the sidebar its right there.
A potential downside is that you now are using two windows instead of one. One window allows you to quickly skim article summaries so you can figure out what you want to read. The other window lets you read the whole article, and also lets you walk through each article in the news feed one by one by using the back and next arrows in the frame header. We hope that this offers the best of both rapid skimming and in-depth reading/commenting.
Let us know what you think!
We're discussing implementation of the next feature - comments. As we noted earlier, we want to conversation around specific articles to remain in the blog's commenting system. But there are topic-specific rather than article-specific discussions that can occur, much like on IRC and discussion forums. So the current thinking is to have a user discussion/comment stream associated with each news topic in a group. Other ideas are welcome.
Logan
