laterstars blog

rss, you’re dead to me - the laterstars manifesto, pt. 1

my story of being a failed digital packrat

So why was laterstars even started, what’s the point? There are already plenty of ways to collect and consume links whenever you want. Sites like Reddit, Digg, Hacker News and the like are all abundant sources of good stuff on tons of different topics. And, of course, people are constantly spreading links around to each other via things like Facebook and Twitter. The problem is there’s just too damn much of it all.

So, people come up with different systems to try to get a handle on it all… RSS/Google Reader for pulling in absolutely every post from all the sources you subscribe to, Instapaper for saving pages to read later, delicious & Pinboard for saving tagged links for posterity, and on and on. They’re all decently workable solutions and have kept people content for years now. I’ve used them all myself.

RSS/Google Reader

However, that’s kind of the problem… I’ve tried and ultimately ended up using a combination of them all. Just like everyone else, I’d built up a huge list of RSS feeds that I’d subscribed to over the years and shoved them all into my Google Reader. I’d tweaked GReader with Helvetireader and various Greasemonkey scripts to try to make the interface somewhat bearable, but eventually just used it as a syncing point for NetNewsWire and pretty much every iPhone RSS app every released (the ones I actually used for a while were NNW, then Byline, then finally Reeder).

Google Reader has the concept of starred articles, so I’d always try to star stuff I was actually interested in from the morass of links… and never come back to them. My GReader stars are a proverbial graveyard of potentially kickass links. But because the RSS firehose of every single subscription you have flooding your inbox with every single thing they want you to see, just getting through a few feeds at all was usually all I could pull off.

Online bookmarking

Browser based bookmarks are a joke. I’ve never seen the utility in them, have never used them, and don’t understand how anyone does. So the web-based bookmarking sites jump in and are all “dogg, i got this, this is what i do. send me links and tag them for organization and I’ll have them all ready for you when you come back to me.” I have some friends who are pretty good with these things, always saving and tagging stuff to delicious and, somewhat more recently, Pinboard. And I tried too. I set up my delicious account years ago, and even bought Pukka for some native app goodness for saving links to it. There were problems, though, that prevented me from ever really getting it… first off, I never really went back to delicious. Things would just get sent off and forgotten, much like starring stuff in GReader. Second, the whole tagging thing just got out of hand. Look at my (and pretty much anyone’s, I’d argue) “tag cloud” and it’s a huge (!) mess of random tags that end up just creating more noise than they’re worth.

And yes, I did try Pinboard. If you haven’t checked it out, the goals are pretty much the same as delicious, but it’s a more modern version, with more integration with other services and a focus on being lean and fast. The interface is super spartan and they brag about being fast and “for introverts” as opposed to delicious’s “social bookmarking” credo. I think I gave it a fair shot, but, for one, these types of sites just aren’t really for me, and two, I love rich functional UIs and Pinboard’s approach of being a big plain list of links just doesn’t get me going. I’m a designer, sue me. I do find some aspects of what they’re doing to be pretty interesting though… particularly the integration of the “to read” concept with a general purpose bookmarking site. Which brings us to…

Instapaper

Instapaper is awesome. (And yes, I’m sure ReadItLater is too.) Anything you actually want to read later, it’s almost perfect for. You use the bookmarklet/extension or the integration in tons of other apps and send whatever page you want to read later to it and forget about it until you load up Instapaper on your browser/iPhone/Kindle and get down to some reading. Tons of apps have integration with it, so getting stuff into it is pretty painless, and the simple text formatting makes it great for reading big ass articles on the iPhone pretty enjoyable. I started saving tons of pages to it and life was good.

But then after a while, I’d just save the articles to it but go for long stretches without visiting the site. That’s fine and is going to happen no matter what, but when I finally did get back to the site it was pretty overwhelming. The web interface is pretty bare bones as far as UI goes… but also in functionality. The main page of my links ended up being ginormous, with what seems like hundreds of items on the page. It loads pretty quickly so it’s not too bad, but psychologically it’s pretty intimidating. So, I started trying to organize them all, archiving links I was still kind of interested in but probably not going to read any time soon, getting rid of others I didn’t care about, and grouping stuff into the new “folders” that were introduced. That’s when I really hit the wall… if you want to delete a link, you have to click on the delete button for it, and click the confirmation button. That’s fine. But if you want to delete a bunch of links, like I did, there’s no way to do anything to multiple links at once as far as I can tell. You have to do the delete and confirm two step for every single one. After a few of these I just gave up. Like I said, my page had hundreds of links on them and I ended up just not deleting any of them. Same thing went for archiving and putting things in folders. It was way easier to just not do anything. This made me realize that this problem was pretty much the same on all the sites.

Aside from these UI issues, I realized that I only really liked Instapaper for things I actually wanted to read, since I enjoy the simplified text formatting on my iPhone. But, I was very reluctant to just shove anything into it. There are always those links to funny pictures and videos, or code snippets or whatever that I want to save. They’re not really things I need to read later, just things I want to keep around like a digital packrat. Instapaper’s UI problems make it hard enough to organize the few things I do want to read… heaven forbid I just throw anything into it and try to check it out later. So that’s where the delicious/pinboard apps came in and the whole ugly cycle of spreading things out perpetuated itself.

So.

That’s quite a lot of words talking about my best attempts at being the most proficient digital version of an episode of Hoarders I can be. I know this is all my personal opinion, and that many of you will jump in to defend your use of your favorite bookmarking site or whatever and tell me how I’m just doing it wrong… that’s cool, everyone’s different, and bring it on. If you’ve found a system you like, I’m real happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but the next post is going to cover my thoughts about why I think the current RSS/Bookmark/Instapaper/etc. dance in general is inherently flawed regardless of the tools, why I started laterstars to scratch my own personal itch, and why I think it’s going to work for me.