![Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ]](http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/wp-content/themes/starkers/images/blank.gif)
27/12/07 If I was reader.google.com
DUBLIN, IRELAND - So if I was Google Reader what would be my killer app to develop?
Step 1 - Did you know every Wordpress blog post (and presumably others) have an RSS feed of their comments? Put /feed/ after the url, try it. Why can’t Google Reader suck this in with every post, and display the comments inline within the blog post? Why do I have to click to the permalink to see the discussion?
Step 2 - Bring the discussion to their own territory. Again why do I have to leave my Reader to join the discussion? A remote POST to wp-comments-post.php could solve this allowing me to post comments from Reader. Maybe they can do this even better.
Step 3 - Reblog not Share. I want a ‘Blog This’ option so I can re-publish quotes/posts with my own commentary on them with automated citations links and trackbacks to the original post. All from within Reader, which should be called ReaderWriter ;-)
Step 4 - Trends. Yawn, show me something interesting. I want to see minutes spent reading a feed, not how many posts from a feed I read. Tell me who I read the most, not who writes the most. It’s rare I hit ‘Mark All As Read’, I just fast scan with the [J] keystroke.
Step 5 - You’ve parsed the feeds already - let me go deeper on a topic by seeing related posts from other blogs. All within Reader.
-Robin
Tags: google, google reader, rss, what would i do
6 Comments
Interesting idea about the direction google reader could take. I often thought about that comments section, it seems very silly that google reader does not allow comment viewing and very rarely has an accurate representation of the number of comments made.
Heh, I’ve been calling it Google ReWriter ;-)
Good ideas, and definitely the way Reader will evolve IMHO. Techcrunch reported in September on the rumours that they’ll add a comment feature on shared feeds and I’m sure they’ll do some trick with Feedburner too.
@James, one thing to remember, Feedburner is still banned in China. Not that it was ever popular over there in the first place though.
What would you think if you owned your comment, not the site you post it to? i.e. The discussion would take place in the cloud via FeedBurner / ReWriter (I like it!) / Jaiku / Your Blog…. a bit like trackbacks work today (but never stored on the site). i.e. you @URL1 your comment and the URL you pointed at (URL1) subs to all @URL1 publications. Now the page will track what’s happening around it.
That’s kinda how I see it happening too Robin. Referring to Sir Tim’s recent great post on the Giant Global Graph, we know that the web is moving away from being document centric towards being object centric.
As TBL says, “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”. And in giving an example he says, “when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself.”
Similarly it’s not the comment *page* that important, as such, rather the individual comments. We’ll all own our comments which will live at unique URIs and be combined ‘on the fly’ to produce a comment page.
It’s interesting that you also include Jaiku as part of the cloud because I’ve found myself commenting on blog posts more and more by commenting on the post title as sucked into Jaiku. Why do I do this? I think because I feel my comments are more likely to be seen by *my* social group when I post them on Jaiku and I’m more interested in bringing my social group into the discussion than getting their opinions, than in hearing what the blogger’s audience thinks, even though the blogger has a way bigger audience than I have followers in Jaiku. I guess you could call it social commenting, where you filter out the conversation to hear just what your followers think. Not that this kind of insularity is necessarily a good thing of course!
@Jonathan, that’s interesting, ‘d no idea Feedburner was restricted in China :(
