Terry Godier’s new feed reader Current is out. I had a feeling he was exploring ideas similar to what I was also working on. In an announcement post, he writes:

As items age, they dim. Eventually they’re gone, carried downstream. You don’t mark them as read. You don’t file them. They simply pass, the way water passes under a bridge.

I have a similar concept in my upcoming feed reader, that items “fade” away and change colors. If you miss them, it’s okay. But Current embraces the river and has all sorts of design ideas beyond that. Really well done.

@manton Hmmm… Really interesting concept. I’m actually waiting to see what you bring to the table. Been using Reeder hooked up to Feedbin for a while but I do think there’s plenty of innovation waiting to happen in this space (email clients too)

@manton I’m dreaming of a minimalist feed reader, river of news, no unread counts, runs in the browser. Pretty much what Terry is building, except that it doesn’t run in the browser. How will you reader work? Is tied to micro.blog or is it a separate app?

@manton I can’t wait to see what happens when they return to email. ;-)

@simonbc The first version of mine is entirely in the web browser. It will be tied to Micro.blog Premium. I’d love to make it an independent app but there are some server costs I haven’t worked out yet.

@manton Interesting. I think there could be a lot of upside to integrating reading and writing on the web like this. Seems like the two should go together. Excited to see how you build it :)

@patrickrhone 🙂 One thing that might hold back email innovation is that moving an archive is difficult. RSS is a little more ephemeral and also we’ve got migrating with OPML. Maybe someone will work on this for email, though. I want to see more apps that say: “Got 15 years of email? Import it here!”

@simonbc Thanks. Yep, a big goal is highlighting and starting new blog posts directly from the reader.

@manton that was behind the idea of river of news, and later – twitter timelines. view the news as a rope you hold loosely in your hands. you can’t read every piece in the NYT, why should online news work differently.

i always thought the idea that news was like email was fundamentally incorrect.

@manton earlier in this thread someone said they wanted what feedland does. one thing we need more than anything is memory, so we don’t keep reinventing the same things over and over. we were supposed to be creating better tools for information, didn’t turn out that way at all.

@manton and yes you do want to integrate reading and writing.

this goes back a long way, every computer came with a basic interpreter in memory. you could type basic code at the command line and it would run it.

then turbo pascal and think c on the mac.

i’ve done a fair number of such products, probably the culmination was radio userland in 2002. did both sides. we enabled a lot of bloggers with that product because they all had the ability to subscribe to each other.

the reader was a river.

@manton – totally agree. that’s where the idea strikes you. and here’s another thing to add to the list, and i bet you can do this in micro.blog, make sure the reply shows up in their blog. comments should be peers with their replies.