When I was ill off school, I remember sitting and just mashing the remote control, as I flicked through endless channels (although actually it must have been just four, thinking about it). I’ve been doing much the same thing today, when I’ve been awake: flicking through a handful of sites, hitting
Back in 2001, stymied by the fact that slashdot.org had eaten NTK’s breakfast by posting daily (NTK’s weekly feed was predicated on the fact that by pushing out every seven days, we could beat Wired’s deadlines by about two months), I tried to project where this was all heading. If the news cycle was shortening to a day, what kind of site would beat slashdot’s daily schedule? I sketched out the design for a website that would just throw news up as fast as it was happening; where you’d suck all of the wires, run them through a document-clustering algorithm, spit out the summaries of any new stories onto an IRC channel ,and have a team just come up with a suitable headline for those clusters (for those of you who knew me back then, that’s what I was talking about when I talked about spoolfeed.com). Story clusters would keep the same permanent URLs, so that once you’d bookmarked a story, any new developments would append to that page (and keep it high in the search ranks).
Spoolfeed’s really evil part, its elevator pitch for cackling VCs, would be that it would always change when you hit reload — no matter how quickly you hit reload. Stories that hadn’t changed between page views would be discarded, so only new items would appear. If you really did use up all the top stories, the space would be filled with the strange edge stories — clumsily translated Portugese news, crummy press releases from business wire. Just make every reload do something.
I felt kind of dirty when I came up with that, because I felt like I was feeding the monster that was eating everyone’s brain. But it also felt inevitable that sites would head this way. I’m surprised that digg.com doesn’t do it now to be honest. Feed the reload beast, and the world’s foolish advertisers and journalists will come baying at your door for your precious hitrates.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Firstly I always felt that NTK was interesting because it covered all the stories that sites like Slashdot wouldn’t hear about till many months had passed. It also had wonderful coverage of the tribes of geeks flowing through the UK which meant that it consistently mentioned people that I knew rather than remote and alien american uber-geeks.
Secondly have you seen FriendFeed? It automatically reloads so if you watch this url: http://friendfeed.com/public you’ll get a constantly changing stream of stuff.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Heh. That was the original plan for goop.org: endless supplies of goop.
September 18th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
@ade — yeah that’s what we ended up concentrating on… if you read the early back issues, we were doing a lot of general news summaries, then we went for local stories, then we went back to news summaries (because the cycle had got so fast people actually *forgot* what had happened at the beginning of the week..)
September 19th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Reload madness gave birth to twitter.. endless useless information. Facebook status on steroid.
September 19th, 2008 at 10:29 am
I think the tool that best recreates the rat-pushing-the-pleasure-button feel of the TV remote control is StumbleUpon. It works better than the collaborative newsfilters because it’s been pared down to a single, essential button: click it, and you get a random webpage matching your interests. Even browsing a list of titles has been removed, it’s just click…click…click…
September 21st, 2008 at 3:19 am
[…] what I’ve read and haven’t read that makes me think of O’Brien’s proposed Feeder Reload system. I’ve also considered moving this blog to Google’s blog supporter as it serves to […]
September 26th, 2008 at 10:43 am
[…] site (reality has once again already transcended my lame predictions: you don’t even have to hit reload for this crack-delivery-mechanism). It’s going to be […]