Phil Wolff writes about his wishlist:
As I surf, it will:
– live in the Windows system tray
– parse pages for urls pointing to syndication formats like RSS and Atom
– verify those feeds exist and collect their metadata
– write a log file of the detection and verification info, in OPML
– display the number of new discoveries when hovering over the system tray icon
– push the file to a server, periodically and optionally.By being a separate application from the RSS newsreader, the autodetective will be:
– Smaller, consuming fewer system resources than a newsreader
– Focused on the craft of detection, becoming smarter about finding things on the pages I read
– Independent of a newsreader, so I can have more than one newsreader (including browser-based ones) without having every page I read parsed for each tool.
– Diverse, detecting tidbits in my emails, chats, IRC sessions, etc.If we wanted to get fatter about the client, it could spider to discover deeper (crawl this site) or discover wider (crawl the blogrolls you see). Less relevance than pages you’ve actually seen, but more context – especially as you revisit favorite blogs and services.
I’d also like the detective to discover more kinds of things and make sense of them:
– Contact information (emails, phone numbers, postal addresses)
– Physical locations (postal addresses, city names, geocoding)
– Calendar events (dates, times, durations, descriptions)
– Rich media (sound, video, flash files)
so I can review and bring them into other software.
What is interesting is that ideas like this have the potential to create a new environment for creating and consuming content – which is what we need. Very little has changed in the way we interact with content in the past 5-7 years. RSS is the disruptive innovation and we need an ecosystem of tools and services around it to take our content experience to the next level.
