Google Reader is dead / long live Swift River

[Chris Blow]

You well-connected folks probably already spit your coffee all over your monitor when you heard Google is in fact actually shutting down Google Reader in July. Shocking? not really? I was a little surprised.

Anyway it struck me that it might be a good opportunity to explain Swift River as an alternative to Google Reader, and to try to get some energy back on this list.

With a few tweaks it could work for me as a daily feed-reading tool.

It seems like something we wouldn't want to pass up without discussion, since so many people are talking about open source aggregators today (my admittedly nerdy timeline is full of chatter of people looking for alternatives, people are talking about hacking their own way.)

My only concern with this idea is that it potentially reinforces the idea that Swift is a general-purpose commodity tool and not something for any specific humanitarian information management workflow, which think is a problem with the current interaction. I would like to demonstrate more humanitarian use cases for folks. But I would also just would really like to see more daily readership happening. 

So I'm thinking the angle is something like "Switch to an open source aggregator with a humanitarian community workflow behind it." OK that's terrible but you get the idea. A less-general use case AND appeal to more users. Iterate toward an improved post-disaster news triage workflow, but first just get the thing tuned for daily reading at full speed.

Thoughts? Would anyone else like to work on a streamlined theme, optimized for reading full feeds (not just tweeds and media embeds)? I think I want to host my own feed reader —if you are gonna go FOSS you might as well really geek out, you know — so I'm interested in digging into the hosting issues, and understanding what's involved in that. Has anyone gotten their own hosting setup somewhere other than localhost?

And what's the big-picture status of the project in 2013? Anything coming up on the roadmap that might be relevant to this direction of hacking? Anyone already using Swift River for daily reading?

I'd be interested to hear if others are interested in putting some effort into a new theme (plugin? etc?) for a release that speaks to all the bleary-eyed folks stumbling out of the google-bar at 2am.

Candid feedback?

c

[Heather Leson]

Chris : Brilliant. I loved GR. Emmanuel, what do you think?

H

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[Ali-Reza Anghaie]

You've got a days long window to make it happen though - the people who are going to miss Google Reader are already on their way to NewsBlur and the such. They also like features like the meta-RSS feed and integration with other services.

And - well - frankly, I still haven't gotten a single thing to work at Swiftriver.io and last I mailed the list *crickets*..

So what's the state of things? I've not got two test rivers I can't delete and can never save anything to. Always an "Oops" error...

-Ali

[Emmanuel Kala]

Ali-Reza, my apologies for the crickets. That's totally on me. 

A brief on the current status & roadmap

• Towards end of last year, we revised the SwiftRiver UI/UX and core architecture for the following reasons:
• The current UI is not as intuitive, finding your way around is quite a hike, high click distance to perform a task, poor feedback messages ….
• The architecture makes it difficult to iterate and scale. To add a new feature, you need to jump through many hoops; a malady we'd all like to avoid. Therefore, we split the application into 2 parts: An API and a web client. The API is documented here: https://wiki.ushahidi.com/display/WIKI/SwiftRiver+API+Resources and you can track development here: https://github.com/ushahidi/SwiftRiver-API. 
• Both the API and new UI build out began in mid-january and are almost complete. http://next.swiftapp.com is the preview server and it gets automatically updated as we iterate (on the API and web app). 
• The feature backlog for the next 2 weeks is comprised of the following:
• Custom forms -  A way for users to add metadata to drops and enforce curation workflows in manual curation scenarios. A sample use case is the task of categorizing instances of hate speech monitoring where a additional information  - target audience, influence of the speaker/author etc - is required.
• Rules - These are akin to mail filters e.g. if the email is from x move to folder y. In our case this would translate to: "If the drop contains x, put in bucket y" or "If the drop has x, discard from the river".
• As for the release schedule/cycle & strategy, our approach is: anything on master is production-ready so we don't have release names. 

On to Chris' question: 

• Perhaps an instapaper/readability-esque plugin to clean up the article content and improve the RSS plugin to get full text feeds. The feeds for some sites only expose the headline and the first paragraph.
• Another possible route is to introduce a new view (alongside drops, list, photos views) - "Reader View", "Book View" or something like that

Thanks.

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Emmanuel Kala
Open Source Crowdsourcing Tools
Skype: emmanuel.kala
Mobile: (+254) (0) 721 247 824
Webiste: http://www.ushahidi.com

[Ali-Reza Anghaie]

THANK YOU for the update!

So the existing accounts and broken rivers will just be disposed of? We should make new accounts to explore for now?

-Ali

[Emmanuel Kala]

The accounts shall remain. As for the rivers we'll most likely set a cut off date which we'll use for purging the data.

For now, the preview server is running off a sample dataset for purposes of development.

--

Regards,

Emmanuel Kala

[Heather Leson]

Hey Folks, I have been thinking about this note. Do you want to have a google hangout (smile) to talk about it? Say, next week?

heather

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Jacob Greer <jacob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Second note: Google has used Google Groups for several of their project development communities.  However, they have been in the process of deprecating those groups in favor of stackoverflow for development questions.  It might not be far off to suggest that Google Groups will also be sunlit in the near future.  When Google+ Circles were introduced they seemed intent on that being the direction for Google Groups.  In addition, the Google Groups announcements haven't been updated since 2011.  Slowly planning for that possibility might be a good idea for the ushahidi dev lists.

--
Heather Leson
Director of Community Engagement
Ushahidi
hle...@ushahidi.com
www.ushahidi.com and https://wiki.ushahidi.com
@heatherleson / skype: heatherleson

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Jacob Greer <jacob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Second note: Google has used Google Groups for several of their project
> development communities. However, they have been in the process of
> deprecating those groups in favor of stackoverflow for development
> questions. It might not be far off to suggest that Google Groups will also
> be sunlit in the near future. When Google+ Circles were introduced they
> seemed intent on that being the direction for Google Groups. In addition,
> the Google Groups announcements haven't been updated since 2011. Slowly
> planning for that possibility might be a good idea for the ushahidi dev
> lists.

I doubt if Google Groups will go away entirely - it's basically
Google's superset of Usenet. But yes, Google+ 'communities' are
probably the 'successor' to Google Groups in some sense. I never used
Google Reader so I'm not amongst the annoyed faction.

I think a more frightening scenario is that Google might drastically
limit the capabilities of free GMail. It's ad-supported now but I
don't think that's a sustainable business model any more than
classified ads are for a print newspaper. ;-)

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I am not an IP address! I am a free man!

[Jacob Greer]

Ah! Yes, that's a good observation! I saw some bloggers wondering what would happen to the usenet archive if/when Google pulls the plug on Google Groups.  The thought seems to be that it might go the way of another archive service, such as the internetarchive or the library of congress.  A few have pointed out that there probably isn't much benefit to Google hosting the archive with Google Groups other than for data mining purposes (which they would be able to do without hosting).

I'm not as worried about Gmail being limited because I think the business model is sustainable and ideal for Google.  They'd rather have the world use gmail (at whatever the server costs) because they data mine email records for adsense targets.  Gmail is seemingly the most obvious point-of-entry into the single-sign-in for Google too (which helps build the adsense metrics in non-google pages using google analytics, supposedly). :)

There are a few observations I've made in my slow transition to the Google+ communities that would be relevant to thinking about Ushahidi moving there eventually: the different in being more social network-y.  More sharable.  More post/comment-based than thread-based.  But probably better to promote the ushahidi ecosystem: sidebars for each project, an events list, a deployment list, resources, tutorials, etc. For instance, the python community is a good example of building a resource community.  I wonder if the transition also brings more users and more activity, Google+ groups seem to bring people who wouldn't normally like the email list approach of Google Groups.

Interesting to note: as Google has been transitioning some of their developer groups away from Google Groups and to Stackoverflow, there is an interesting change in their developer engagement occurring from a combination of Google developers not as actively participating and a larger solution community answering before Google sees them.  Not as relevant for Ushahidi, but perhaps there would be a similar trend if more people were more frequent about checking their Google+ than their Google Group emails (etc).

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[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Also, Google Code seems to be losing out to Github. Considering how
rotten the Google Code user interface is, that's not a huge surprise.

[Chris Blow]

Heather, I would be game for a hangout soon!

c

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[Heather Leson]

Grand. There is a Swift Event on the 25th. http://www.meetup.com/Ushahidi-Community/events/113659032/ (Nairobi based).   Maybe we should have it after that

Chris, i'll sync with you and then make it so

Heather