"River View" Round-up and our take at Attensa

While we've spent an inordinate amount of time with a new "river view" at Attensa, I didn't think too many folks paid a whole heck of a lot of attention to it. However, since Dave Winer brought it to the forefront here, over the past several days there have been several posts and active commenting and now I have been thinking about it even more. Scoble poses the question as does Orchant. Jupiter's Gartenberg does too. Dave Winer describes how he think it should work and why the "river view" is useful:

...Instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds, you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up. To me, this more approximates the way I read a print newspaper, actually it's the way I wish I could read a print newspaper -- instead of having to go to the stories, they come to me. This makes it easier for me to use my brain's powerful scanning mechanism. It's faster, I can subscribe to more, and my fingers do less work.

Dave Winer likes the new EarthLink FeedReader even though his aggregator back in 1999 apparently did something similar. He writes:

...It apparently seems counter-intuitive even to very smart users like Mike Arrington, who said "Neither are cutting edge," of the two new Earthlink tools. As much as I adore Mike, the Earthlink reader has the essential feature all others (except mine) are missing. They show you the new stuff first. You can't see how important that is with just one use. Go ahead and import your OPML and go back tomorrow, and the day after, and you'll see what a huge difference it makes to have the computer figure out what's new for you.

Of course, so-called "River Views" are nothing new. Our Outlook reader did not have a scrolling river view until our 1.5 feature set was being solidified, but it was the clear, if not only, user interface that made sense for the roll out of our "predictive ranking" which is enabled by our AttentionStreams. I know this sounds like a nbunch of marketing jive but it is totally unique and worth a look. Here is a very specific page with call-outs to our new river view. Essentially the new river view displays three attention-derived views:

• Priority - This view uses Predictive Ranking to intelligently predict which subscriptions and articles will be most important to you at any given time.
• Favorites - Articles are displayed based on which subscriptions are read most frequently and consistently. In addition to viewing prioritized list based on AttentionStream analysis. You can manually rank feeds by simply dragging and dropping the subscription to the top or bottom of their subscription lists.
• Date - This view displays articles based on the most recently updated newsfeeds.

This last view, "Date", is essentially what most "river of news" products deliver that you would find in other products (online or off.) That said, I agree with most folks (punits or otherwise) that it is of dubious value. This feature will likely be possible in Microsoft Outlook 2007, I haven't double checked and I am on a mac now so I'm just guessing. There is also some good discussion on other tactics such as according to Technorati's own Kevin Marks...just upload your OPML and search (avoiding deletions) or follow Andrew Grumet's lead and use radio time stamps (?) which has says is working well. Lastly is a winer post about the new EarthLink FeedReader and calling it an "important product." I haven't looked at it yet but appears that I will be soon...more later on that specifically but on the surface looking at their claims, "recent items" are less useful than your attention based behavior. Well, that's our position anyway.

NOTE: We ARE in public beta and many power users (with LOTS of feeds) will need to be patient importing your OPML to give our "smart river" a try. Upon the initial running of the app it will take a while for the attensa engine (which does not sit in outlook btw) to load all the feeds and set up...this is a one time event. Once you start using it the app it observes your behavior and there is no performance hit.

OK, it's time for me to chime in with an opinion rather than just discuss the Attensa "River." Despite the novel advances found in Attensa 1.5, I still think both views are useful - even a plain river of news that we have all seen to date. I have hundreds of feeds subcategorized into about 20 sub folders, and in some cases those subfoldfers have folders too. Like Scoble, I can go directly to a folder and read only the contents of one particular feed. This is a natural way of working and for those that take the time to set up Outlook's rules to auto categorize their content...it is VERY natural. The river of news can be a big time saver in a business environment, especially if it delivers some value add rather than being ONLY a "view." With Attensa's river view you can have just a river view of a sub-folder, which is how I am using it most of the time.

The email in-box (in any application) is set, by default, to what amounts to a most recent first, unsorted "river of news." We can probably all agree that without any filtering this can be overwhelming and perhaps the primary reason that e-mail is falling out of favor as a productivity tool (except for spam and viruses of course!)

Attensa for Outlook is our take at a first look at a "smart river." I'm anxious to watch how folks respond.

Perhaps too late, but end of ramble.

Tags: Attensa, Attention, Microsoft Outlook, River of News, Scoble, Dave Winer, Marc Orchant, EarthLink FeedReader, OPML, RSS