I first found out about the www.start.com/1 and www.start.com/2 prototypes from Dare Obasanjo's post on
the subject
here. It seems that Microsoft is getting into the web-based Rss aggregator
market. I was first introduced to RSS aggregator via Dare's awesome
RSS Bandit client many moons ago. However as I bounced around from work and
home, it became increasingly difficult to keep the feed read states in sync. In
addition, if I added a feed at work, I'd have to add it at home as well. I seem
to remember hearing something about RSS Bandit providing synchronization to get
around this issue, but I abandoned it long before that.
My new favorite aggregator became Bloglines. I'm still using it to this day.
I've made my subscriptions
public, so you can see what I read. Plus you get to see how disorganized my
feeds are. What do I like about Bloglines?
- I can read it at Home, Work, at a friends house, the library, or across
the world.
- I can use the Bloglines
toolkit for Firefox and right click on any feed I come across and add it
to my subscriptions.
- I can share my blog subscriptions
- I can search my blog subscriptions or all of the Bloglines subscriptions
- I can clip blogs and retrieve them from any other computer
- I can read Bloglines on my PocketPC
- And many many more cool things
So what does this have to do with
www.start.com? Well, as I said, I heard about this a little over a week ago,
and the progress that has been made so far is astounding. Not only that but
Firefox support is coming along nicely.
What suggestions do I have for the start.com site?
- Allow for a public API
- Allow me to import my Bloglines subscription (see suggestion 1)
- Make it easy for me via a Firefox/IE extension to add feeds to my
profile while I'm browsing around the web and find a cool feed
- Allow me to create feeds from searches against the start.com catalog of
feeds
- Allow me to clip a blog entry for later perusal
- Make it easy to rearrange feed/categories perhaps via AJAX or is it XAP?
Steve Rider is blogging about the latest goings on here. In addition he's
added a feed to help keep
us up to date on the latest and greatest changes to start.com here. Looks like
Scoble
can't fire him now.