History of the Radio UserLand News Aggregator
Posted by Dave Winer, 6/11/02 at 7:53:23 AM. A news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page."My.UserLand.Com, centralized aggregation
UserLand built its first news aggregator, My.UserLand.Com, in 1999. It was the first aggregator built on the now-popular format called RSS, a flavor of XML, which was co-developed by UserLand and Netscape.
My.UserLand.Com, which is now deactivated, was a centralized aggregator, it ran on a server at UserLand. Every hour it would scan all the sources that were registered and gathered the new stuff, much as the aggregator in Radio does today. I remember the rush, and believing that some day everyone would read the Web this way. Instead of clicking on links in a bookmark list, scanning visually to see what's new and then clicking on the Back button, which was the standard way of reading on the Web in 1999, the software could do the work for me, and only show me the new stuff. It's an accelerated way to read news, a person using an aggregator is more informed than one who doesn't.
But the centralized approach had severe limits, especially as the number of XML-based feeds grew and then exploded. The My.UserLand aggregator subscribed to every feed that was registered. The hourly scans took longer, and users rightly clamored for the ability to subscribe to feeds, to only see those sources that interested them. But UserLand didn't have the resources to build the big centralized system that the users wanted, so of course, we decentralized.
Radio UserLand 7, the first desktop aggregator
Early in 2001 we released Radio UserLand 7.0 which was the first software to bring XML-based aggregation to the desktop. It was also called My.UserLand-On-The-Desktop, or MUOTD for short. We started by porting the centralized aggregator to our Radio shell. By default it would be subscribed to several feeds to get things started, but it also had the ability for the user to subscribe to feeds by entering the URL of a RSS file in a Web page.
Every hour the aggregator reads the subscribed-to feeds, finds the new bits, and presents them on the News page, in reverse-chronologic order. We then spent the rest of 2001 perfecting the software, deepening the weblog editor, and making the software easy to install and easy to use.
Radio 8, desktop aggregation goes commercial
A year later, in January 2002, Radio UserLand 8.0 shipped, and news aggregation became a mainstream application.
Here's how it works. When you launch the Radio application it opens the home page of your desktop website which is the control panel for the application. From this page you can get to every other page in the Radio environment, and to the public version of your weblog, and to services provided by the community server.
I'm subscribed to quite a few sources, and the range of sources is significant. Consider that I get news from the New York Times, BBC, and from weblogs like The .NET Guy (expert programmer), Jon Udell (Infoworld columnist), my own weblog (Scripting News). I also get news from News.Com, The Motley Fool, The Register, Doc Searls, a local newspaper in South Carolina (Go Upstate), O'Reilly's Safari service, Patrick Logan (a developer). These are just the sources that have already updated this morning, and it's only 8:30AM. I am currently subscribed to 48 feeds, some people I know are subscribed to as many as 300!
There are so many interesting things to observe about this. Not only am I getting news from professional news organizations, but I am also hearing from people and non-news organizations who make a difference to me. I've assembled my own personal newspaper that updates every hour. Rarely an hour goes by without something interesting happening, my mind is stimulated, I get new ideas from theirs, and of course I share them, and some of these people also subscribe to my feed, and of course, some don't. It's all about choice, customization, and change. No one has the same virtual newspaper as mine, and mine is changing all the time.
Hook the exhaust to the intake
As we were completing Radio 8, late in 2001, I noticed a few interesting things about the software we had created.
First, unless you turn it off, every Radio weblog is available in RSS, in addition to HTML. This means that every Radio weblog is also a feed you can subscribe to. In all likelihood, as I write this in June 2002, Radio users are the largest single source of RSS on the Internet. We made it totally easy to hop on the bandwagon.
Second, when a Radio user subscribes to another Radio user, or to any other RSS source, this creates a relationship that's stronger and deeper than just a reader and a writer. When I subscribe to someone else's feed I am making a commitment to listen to that person. I've decided that whatever they say is something that I want to hear. Before this, no such concept existed in the Web.
