Enough News!
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 8:41PM | ispivey I've mentioned before that I have a problem with too much information input and not enough time to deal with it or ways to filter it. I want to have a website where I can go and read the most important news for me everyday that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes, and then get on with my life.
So I put together news.ianspivey.com, which I mean to use for my daily news-reading. If you use Google Reader, try news.ianspivey.com/r/.
Right now, it lets you read articles on Google News or Google Reader for ten minutes, and then locks you out until the next day. And that's kinda cool! But I don't get all of my news through Google News or Reader. So my next task is to figure out what to do with the content pane. Aggregation of headlines à la popurls, a URL bar so users can navigate wherever they like, or maybe just the latest lolcat? I'm wary of making this too complex.
Input would be appreciated. Would you ever find something like this useful? What should change? Is it stupid?
Reader Comments (3)
Ian,
I'd say there is most certainly a niche available for this, and people would find it useful. There are all sorts of forced-focus apps out there to make sure you only see one window at a time, or only do X for Y minutes a day, etc.
I know if I let it my gReader takes over my world. But I do so love the firehose of information.
I like the idea and I think it has buzz marketing potential. Not sure how this could become a business or how many people would try it. But, if you got some good buzz out of it, you could use that buzz to spread the word about the other venture you are working on.
As for a suggestion, wouldn't something like this work better as a firefox add-in?
Chris, thanks! I should probably spend a little time seeing how this fits in the world of existing forced-focus applications.
V, I agree that this isn't much of a business in and of itself -- definitely most useful as a little utility! And yes, it would be much more effective (in terms of functionality) as an add-in. But downloading an add-in is a bigger barrier to adoption. I really like the simplicity of something that runs in javascript and doesn't even need a log-in to be functional.