The other night, on the way home, an idea came to me…so I pulled up my development environment and decided to write some code. I think my terrified development team is probably locking me out of the source control systems as we speak… ;-)
My thought was this. I’m a visual person, and a lot of the feeds I subscribe to have images in the posts. If I could see all of those images together, I could make some quick decisions about what I want to read now, vs. what I will read later. And thus was born the image aggregator.
Take a look for yourself – click here, and use your NewsGator Online username/password.
If you’re one of those types who is completely caught up with all of your unread feeds, you won’t see anything. But if you have unread stuff, you’ll see a compilation of all of the images in your unread posts. If you click on one, that post will get marked as read in NG/Online, and you’ll get linked out to the post.
Here’s an example of what I see for my own account (click for larger version):
It lets me get an idea, at a glance, of what’s available to read.
This is obviously an EARLY prototype of something, which may or may not see the light of day…but I think it’s an interesting concept. Any thoughts from you about it? Useful or no?
Aside: this was all written using the public NewsGator Online API.
That is very cool – nicely done! Keep it coming!
-kevin
This image aggreagtor is just what I was looking for but hadn’t yet found. http://www/wists.com is close but not an aggregator. Think about using your opml file (build it at http://www.opmlmanager.com) to store data about yourself. Say you create a post/entry on your blog for every CD/album you own (assume you own lots). You can create an RSS feed to each CD/entry. Each entry can be basically an image with an underlying URL to, say, Amazon.com (Wists.com enables you to create such a thumbnail and then paste the script into your blog entry). This blog might be comprised of hundreds of CDs.
Your image aggregator will now enable someone to display those CDs dynamically.
The next step might be enables the aggregator image page (of those feeds) to be “scripted” and displayed on another blog as a badge (analogous to the flickr.com badge).
If this all lived in a dynamic opml reading list your CD collection (that’s one example, there’s thousands of applications) to be portable and imported into other applications.
How about calling it the “Feed Tickr”?
Tim Post
Sorry. Not “Feed Tickr” but rather “Image Tickr”
Very cool. This could revolutionize porn- I mean, RSS. ;)
Greg Reinacker has cooked up an image aggregator prototype for NewsGator. Very cool stuff. I ran his…[more]
“Take a look for yourself – click here, and use your NewsGator Online username/password.”
Erm, excuse me, but isn’t this a great way for you to catch a whole load of UID/PW combos? Not that you would, but..
i want to see more of theimage on the lower left :-)
cool idea!
nicely done!
This is a great idea! Is the source code available?