Monthly Archives: July 2012

Content discovery… isn’t it solved?

I love browsing through contents – news, blog articles, discussions – on the Web. In particular, my core interests are programming, web development & design, data mining, startups, entrepreneurship and occasionally some interesting insights into psychology, how brain works, behavioural studies etc etc.

Given such a vast array of options available on the Web to find contents, I have been signing up for almost every news discovery and aggregation services I could get my hands on for the last 2 or 3 years. Let’s recap some of them here.

  • Techmeme
  • Google Reader (TechCrunch, Mashable, The Next Web, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat etc)
  • HackerNews (LOVE!)
  • News.me
  • Prismatic
  • Digg (occasionally)
  • Reddit (strange world)
  • Local news papers
  • Some really good bloggers (codinghorror, daringfireball)
  • Wavii
  • Bottlenose
  • News360
  • Flipboard

That’s just a few that I can think of top of my head, but I think there should be about 10 more to my list.

From what I have observed in the last month or two, I think between Techmeme, Google Reader, HackerNews, I have to say I’m covered about 99% of all the news I should be interested.

Anymore than above three, I find redundant, annoying and waste of time because even if I log in to other services (e.g. Bottlenose for example), I see the same stories that I have read in my top 3 services.

So is content “discovery” a covered field for me? Maybe there are others who are still lurking out there looking for contents through different means, but within my interests, none of the discovery sites are giving me anything new. They are pulling data from RSS feeds, Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, some scoring on popularity and then presenting them to you.

What I would love to see, on the flipside, however, is to filter out contents that I know I am absolutely NOT interested in. Maybe that will save me time in sifting through articles, but whether that is a feature good enough for a new product, I am not entirely sure.

Deploying my first Trigger.io mobile app – FaithfulNews mobile web app

Articles like Fred Wilson’s “Mobile is where the growth is” certainly gets developers like me considering and you can’t help, but agree with him on the trend; things are moving to, and continually will move toward a mobile web/computing.

There’s a catch though for us developers. As a lonesome developer, or an indie group, it is hard to scale, if you are trying to capture the ever-fragmented mobile space. The space also comes with a huge demand on your behalf as a developer to learn various languages, tools, configurations (YUCK!), engage in forums, Stackoverflow questions, communities, plugins, libraries, frameworks etc.

I mean it only took me 10 years to feel somewhat comfortable with my Java, PHP, JS, CSS, HTML5 toolset and now I’m facing this giant wall of Objective C, Android (would be easier), Windows (who does this?) and Blackberry (who?).

On the other hand, there is a glimmer of hope – HTML5 is keep calling itself as the saviour of the fragmented mobile space and provides that elusive promise of “build once, run anywhere”. I have to admit, such a promise always seems a little far-fetched, but tempting simultaneously.

That’s where Trigger.io comes in. Their endeavour is to build an app in HTML5 & JS and then easily deploy to Web, iOS and Android (other platforms are coming) and all is done using their command-line tool called “forge tools” and enforces no framework or library, but the freedom for you to build your app, the way you want.

So I was far too tempted to give this a try. I spent about 2 days redesigning my good ole’ FaithfulNews and also realised a fair number of peoeple (about 20%) were visiting the site via mobile phones. This was a perfect opportunity for me to build a very simple news reader and well, believe it or not, after about 45 minutes of coding, I had the mobile web version ready. You can check it out here – FaithfulNews mobile. You know what is even cooler? Now I can get this base code and deploy for iOS and Android.

Trigger.io is an awesome tool. I still can’t believe how quickly I have been able to get the job done. Mind you though, I think the fact that I knew my way around JS – (Backbone.js) helped me enormously. Plus, to build a decent Trigger.io based app, I think good knowledge in JS is highly advantageous.

I will be continually exploring this world of mobile in the coming days. I’ve had a list of mobile app ideas and I’m not entirely sure whether Trigger.io can handle all of them, but there’s only one way to find out!