The river of news

August 22, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis

Dave Winer is up to something important… again. He has been talking about wanting “rivers of news” — that is, headlines stripped of the packaging around them to give him a constant flow of what’s new. And he just created a few to feed his — and our — mobile phones.

What’s fascinating about this is that while consultants and think tanks aplenty are still running around trying to come up with fancy applications made just for mobile but Dave shows that the best application is simplicity: Just the news, sir. And keep it flowing.

He created rivers from The New York Times and the BBC and while he was at it, he created no-ballast versions of a handful of blogs (what about me, Dave?).

Note that the only graphics on the pages he created are an orange question mark that leads to an brief explanation page with a picture of Dave. That’s it. Otherwise, it’s just information. In a sense, it’s like RSS, except it’s even simpler, even dumber: just a page with an address that has the latest from a source. I’ve been using them today and they’re quite compelling just because they are so simple and fast and to-the-point.

At some point, I’ll want to customize them; I don’t want sports. And the sources will have to figure out their ad strategy for the mobile world, but they’re doing that anyway. (He points to Times printer pages, which are sponsored.) But they should take the example from this simplicity.

(Full disclosure: Dave is an investor in Daylife, where I’ve been working; that was where I first heard him push his demand for rivers of news.)

: LATER: Ewan MacLeod explains why this is better than the state of the art.

http://www.scripting.com/ Dave Winer

Jeff, I’ve set up a mobile-friendly version of BuzzMachine for you. It’ll take a way for the domain name to make it around the next, but when it does it’ll be at:

http://buzzmachine.scripting.com/

And thanks for the writeup, I’m really excited about the Times river, and there’s more on the way…
Herve Eulacia

Looks like you’re trying to reinvent the wheel here LOL. The NYT has been available for mobile phones and PDAs for years :) Without any setup or configuration, just by following this simple link with any browser or micro-browser : http://partners.nytimes.com/avantgo/main.html

And don’t you start crying a river for BBC :) Here again, light mobile content has always been there : http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm

Nothing new here.

More on this at : http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/2006/08/reinventing-the-mobile-web-with-dave-winer
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http://eoinpurcell.wordpress.com Eoin Purcell

I have to admit I agree a little on reinventing the wheel.

I’m pretty sure that xFruits do this well! Check out their web site!

It may not be terribly fancy but even with GPRS on my very plain Nokia I get a nice set of headlines for my feed. The problems arise when you try to read apost, they are a bit wider than my puny screen. Otherwise wonderful!

Eoin
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http://cellar.org/iotd.php Undertoad

A buddy of mine came up with this set of mobile-accessible links… in 1999:

Plinkit
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http://civilities.net/people/JonGarfunkel Jon Garfunkel

I’m with everybody else on this being a wheel being reinvented. Meanwhile, I’ve been talking to a friend in Nashville while IMing a Dell customer service guy in India. We are now at the 25 minute mark and they have yet to concede a broken monitor. Maybe after the river of news has run through, can we get back to the river of tech support? Lemme just call my broker to short their stock, first…
http://philwilson.org/blog/ Phil Wilson

Jeff, you and Ewan are both wrong. The two big example sites Dave gives (the BBC and the NY Times) already provide this information in the pared-down way Dave is doing themselves. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/pda/default.htm and http://partners.nytimes.com/avantgo/main.html

Out of interest, compare http://techcrunch.scripting.com/ with http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch and http://www.techcrunch.com/ with CSS disabled.
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http://www.marketing.fm/2006/08/23/marketing-advertising-blog-network-launch/ Lee

I love the idea of consolidated and all-star feeds. We just started one for marketing and advertising too here: http://www.marketing.fm/2006/08/23/marketing-advertising-blog-network-launch/

Check it out if you get a chance
eric v

hilarious! It was funny enough when winer claimed to have invented blogging and rss without any credit to those that came (long) before him, but mobile feed reading? You realize that people have been reading feeds on mobile devices through proxy filters for long bout 2 or 3 years now, right? I can hardly wait for dave to invent word processing and the idea of “linking to another site” with his new invention “hypertext”. It’s cute how you new york guys don’t get what a joke winer is. He can’t wait for you to blog about his latest invention,…wait for it….spellcheck!
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http://shey.net Tim

I’ve been designing mobile interfaces for a really long time (at least, for someone my age). Founded one of the first mobile design + content companies in the US (proteus.com) and, as far as we know, we built the first dynamic, CMS-powered WAP site to present news in reverse-date format, with Motorola in 1999. In other words, we built a corporate news blog that rendered on WAP phones.

That all said, cred properly established, I think this rivers concept when applied to mobile browsing is quite cool, and everyone here saying Dave is reinventing the wheel, well, maybe it needs reinventing. Mobile web just has not caught on fast enough. The great thing about the rivers metaphor to me is that it merges tributaries — various feeds — and opens up a really nice potential for customization for the user.

I’ve found the mobile Bloglines product for PDAs completely unusable, for instance, as well as most of the mobile RSS readers I’ve tried, to the point of giving them up, and I just hit sites like Kottke’s remainders on my Blackberry, and wait til I get on a laptop to read the other feeds I like.

Now, imagine if Bloglines or My Yahoo launches a personalized rivers product tomorrow. Log in, check off the sites you want to follow via mobile, enter your blackberry email address, and a minute later, you get a link to your personalized river of news sent to your phone. All your blog headlines, identified by author/feed, on one easy to load page, in reverse chron order. And if you really wanted to get fancy, a little pagination every 25 posts or so, the better to sip content if on a slower phone or network.

I want that.

If I had a little more ambition, I’d stay up tonight and build it, figure out a way to insert some text ads here and there from various Web 2.0 startups ;-) — then announce the new company right here in this post.

But instead, I’m hoping some of you fine folks build this tomorrow, as like I said, I’d love to use it.
http://shey.net Tim

Catching myself being Blackberry-centric — you could just as easily enter your mobile number and carrier and get an SMS link / WAP push to your phone… supported on a pretty good amount of phones out there with a browser these days. Or go to a site like m.bloglines.com and log in.

There remain the design decisions of — full posts in the river or headlines only? Headlines then link to mobile translated pages from the site, or whatever’s in the RSS feed (full posts/abstracts)? Are comments valuable to a mobile user? But that said, not a lot left to work out there.
Steven Jones

Dave Winer doesn’t get it: we’ve been doing this for years.

Read some phone blogs and find out.

The BBC has had its own “River” here since 1997
http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm

Didn’t Dave check, first?

See Google and Squeezer – rivers of news indeed.

http://www.google.com/reader/m/
http://squeezer.net/

Anything else?
Steven Jones

oops:

Skweezer is at http://www.skweezer.net/

http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/2006/08/reinventing-the-mobile-web-with-dave-winer

Some due diligence would be welcome, Jeff. Or even a little research.
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http://www.scripting.com/ Dave Winer

Steven, maybe you didn’t do your homework! :-)

Those are not rivers, they are nice mobile news sites, but that’s not what a river is.

There’s a great Guardian article out today that explains.

http://tinyurl.com/py57l

Have a read, maybe there’s something new for you to enjoy!

Dave
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http://www.ekolkurye.com/ kurye

very nice great post :)
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http://www.e-comfortusa.com/index.php?cPath=143_256 R. Combi-Dual Boilers

Love the analogy with the “river” of news. Constant flow of information could very well be described as a river and your lucky to have a guy like Dave on your team!
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