Using Microsoft’s Syndicated Client Experience (SCE) SDK, I put together a prototype desktop “reader” for thredr.com.
Think in terms of the New York Times Reader experience crossed with the micro-conversation tracking provided by thredr. With thredrReader you can get a “desktop”-style experience while reading through the stories and posts gathered by thredr.
The SCE Starter Kit has everything to build a reader like I’ve shown here. There are some things you need to do to get it to work. For instance, the reader doesn’t use a standard RSS feed; it uses an extended format. This wasn’t too much of a hassle for thredr, since there’s a custom app generating the content already, so I simply added a couple functions to render the RSS feed that the reader needs. Right now it just outputs text. I’m still working on fleshing out the content so that it can handle images and other content.
There are a couple issues I’m working through. First and foremost, the model assumed in the reader doesn’t quite match that of conversation aggregators such as thredr. With a reader, such as the New York Times Reader, the NYT owns all their content so has no problem republishing it all in digital format. In an aggregator, this is not true. Further, many source feeds don’t contain the full content anyway, so without doing some extra work, the whole story isn’t available anyway.
This isn’t a huge deal, because the text excerpts can simply be a link to the originating web content to view the rest of the story, but this isn’t the optimal experience offline. A prefetch of this content for offline viewing may be needed.
Similarly, there’s a whole copyright issue. Thredr can provide a text snippet or image thumbnail, just like a search engine will, but it can’t present more in the reader. My current approach is to have a flag that signals whether content from a particular site can be replicated in the reader. I have no problem with my content being duplicated in the reader, but I can appreciate the fact that there are others that would not like this. No problem. It shouldn’t copy the content by default. This should be a special case.
One nice thing about the reader over using the browser to read the content is that it is searchable. This feature is more useful than I thought it would be. In fact, I’ve began to wonder about twisting it into a filtered view where you specify want you want to watch for.
So, I’m still thinking through what it means to make the conversations as accessible as possible. Thoughts, anyone?