No real mystery...
Newspapers = day old news printed on paper.
Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
31–40 of 44 posts
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#32/pushes button
>modal dialog: "Are you sure you wanted to push that button? No / Yes"
/pushes yes.
/pushes another button
>modal dialog: "You pushed that button you pushed!"
/pushes ok.
Yep, I'm really seeing the Bing/Microsoft side of the application's design. I wonder if it asks if you want to launch the application when you launch the application?
I find it particularly ironic that the yes/no dialog comes up on the button with the greatest amount of error-room, while the one that just says "yaay!" has essentially the least. Apparently they're not a fan of Fitts' Law or its ramifications; they just put the double-check cost on the hardest button to miss, and the "congrats" on the one easiest to miss.
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#33News is a funny market. If you say to someone "we'll help you find interesting or relevant news articles" they'll shrug and say it isn't a problem. Keeping informed as to what is happening in the world is a solved problem - by editors. And whilst the current solutions (eg: everyone sees the same content on BBC) aren't perfect they're good enough and this is a tough product to justify to users. Additionally, changing…
I can't say I understand why some people would consider RSS feeds to be too complex. There really are only two operations that you have to know how to do:
1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss button in the url bar.)
2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page full of articles.
Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it comes down to it, the system is incredibly simple. Far simpler than visiting a every site to find updated articles...
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#34News is a funny market. If you say to someone "we'll help you find interesting or relevant news articles" they'll shrug and say it isn't a problem. Keeping informed as to what is happening in the world is a solved problem - by editors. And whilst the current solutions (eg: everyone sees the same content on BBC) aren't perfect they're good enough and this is a tough product to justify to users. Additionally, changing…
I can't say I understand why some people would consider RSS feeds to be too complex. There really are only two operations that you have to know how to do: 1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss button in the url bar.) 2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page full of articles. Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it com…
RSS readers suck. I've signed up for a abandoned Google Reader at least three times. Here's why:
1. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow. 2. Adding all these into Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying. 3. Once I add them in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts. 4. Suddenly I'm faced with two things:
a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal with.
b. A generic, plain, boring interface in which Gizmodo articles, Slate articles, NYTimes articles....all look exactly the same, as if they'd been published by...Google.
I can't stand RSS readers.
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#35So they're going to kill newspapers by....stealing all their headlines and packaging them in a (marginally) better UI...that they charge money for?
Yes, that's definitely going to kill newspapers. Good luck with that one.
Looks like I've got one more line to add to all my robots.txt files.
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#36I wonder if personalized news has that much appeal, really. Part of the success of traditional tv, radio and newspapers is the shared experience with some group you identify with. Incidentally, this is why I read news.YC also, it's fascinating to read what smart people have to say after they have been exposed to the same stimulus like you. With traditional media, this discussion was in the pubs or the workplace the d…
Yes! You put it very well. I've felt this for a while but not been able to get it down like you have.
I'm usually on the "cutting edge" when it comes to things online, new technology, apps, and so forth, but no "personalized news" service has ever stuck with me. It "feels" wrong and I can't put my finger on why. I prefer to just subscribe to a handful of trusted sources and let a human (or many humans, in the case of HN or Reddit) curate what I'll be seeing.
I believe, however, that better querying is going to become a big deal and could become a good way to have "personalized" news but without all of the AI and guessing games that seem to take place with clever new personalized news services.
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#37The music in the video had to be the worst selection of music for a demo video of all time. Note to self. Lay off the beat boxing.
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't say I understand why some people would consider RSS feeds to be too complex. There really are only two operations that you have to know how to do: 1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss button in the url bar.) 2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page full of articles. Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it com…
RSS readers suck. I've signed up for a abandoned Google Reader at least three times. Here's why: 1. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow. 2. Adding all these into Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying. 3. Once I add them in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts. 4. Suddenly I'm faced with two things: a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal wi…
Beyond "RSS readers suck", basically reading on a computer sucks. I can't do it for more than about 10 minutes without needing to rest my eyes. On the other hand I can sit and peruse the Sunday paper for an hour or more and not have any such feeling. I can get absorbed in a novel and read without a break for half the day. That's NEVER happened looking at a computer display.
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't say I understand why some people would consider RSS feeds to be too complex. There really are only two operations that you have to know how to do: 1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss button in the url bar.) 2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page full of articles. Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it com…
RSS readers suck. I've signed up for a abandoned Google Reader at least three times. Here's why: 1. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow. 2. Adding all these into Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying. 3. Once I add them in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts. 4. Suddenly I'm faced with two things: a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal wi…
Hm. I guess that's why you and I differ. I carefully trim my RSS feed so that I have, at most, 100 items a day to read. Any more than that and it feels like too much of a chore to slog through all of them. However, with only 100 items I feel like its a manageable level of content for the day. I also tend to keep my rss feeds limited to low-frequency feeds. I find it especially nice for feeds that update once a day. I then don't have to keep checking back at the site to see if it's updated yet. Sites like Ars Technica that have high volume, I still prefer to read from the site itself. Then I can avoid the pain of having my feeds filled with hundreds of unnecessary articles.
However, the most important reason why I like using rss is for blogs that I stumble across that I like, but that I don't have the memory to keep all the urls in my head, or the time to spend flipping through all of them to see if they've updated. Let me give you an example: I subscribed a few months ago to a blog that was effectively dead. The author hadn't posted for about a year. Just yesterday in my blog feed, I saw that he had made a new post. I would have completely missed his post if not for the fact that I had his feed in my rss reader.
I completely understand your point about google stripping the formatting out of posts, and it annoys me sometimes too, but for the most part I tend to value content over nice css.
EDIT: I'd like to head off any comments I get about the "memorizing urls" comment I made. I find myself on a lot of different computers, and "bookmarking" a site through adding its rss feed to google reader is a lot easier for me than it is to deal with syncing bookmarks. Not to mention that my bookmarks have become an untamed jungle over time. I only venture into them when I am not looking for anything in particular. For most everything I use the autocompletion on the url bar.
Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
#40The thing about technological progress is that the replacement is never just "the old thing, only on computers". When people in the 90s wrote about the Internet and the Digital Library, quite a lot of them were envisioning something like Google Books, which is just a collection of books, only online! What actually happened was Wikipedia. (And a lot of other stuff, all of which further proves my point, but Wikipedia i…
Nobody in the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming Tim Berners-Lee mentioned "General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc." as the first area for intended uses of hypertext, see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html He also mentioned collaborative authoring. The innovation of Wikipedia is public editing which made sense when the general population came online.
Pretty sure Tim Berners-Lee fits under the "wildest visionary" classification. This is a compliment.