Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to write an article or two about design choices that I’ve made in Zesty News. The ideas for Zesty News started forming in late-2002, and were fairly concrete by mid-2003. I remember talking to Nigel, my boss at the time, about some of the ideas. At that point, with a baby coming in July, I was not in a good position to make a run for it.
Late last year, I surveyed the scene and decided that I’d give it a go. None of the feed readers out there did what I wanted. Despite new RSS readers popping up all the time, they nearly all seemed to be clones of one another.
In short, and I’m sure that everyone will agree with me on this, there is plenty of room in the RSS reader space for new development and new ideas. Feed readers haven’t entered the mainstream yet, but the increasing number of mainstream articles about blogs and RSS is changing that. Millions of people are using Firefox now, which raises the awareness of RSS through its little orange icon in the lower right hand corner. Safari 2.0, shipping today as part of Mac OS X Tiger, adds a blue RSS emblem. And IE7, going into beta this summer, will also reportedly have RSS support.
2005 is probably the year that news aggregation crosses the chasm. While I’m sure that there will be a small handful of dominant players, as with any business, the size of the ecosystem will be so much larger that even small players like Blazing Things can have a role.
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April 29th, 2005 at 2:02 pm
> None of the feed readers out there did what I wanted.
So despite that there’s a huge growing market, what makes Zesty special?
April 29th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
That’s what I’ll be talking about in greater detail in the coming articles.
The most noticeable thing is that Zesty doesn’t look like a mail reader. That’s a difference that it has from a good chunk of the readers out there, and as I evolve it that difference will become larger.
May 9th, 2005 at 2:25 pm
Thanks
June 4th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Does it realy work?