The Order of Feeds in an Aggregator
Here’s a post from Canadians are Smug about the way My Yahoo! organizes the feeds in their new beta aggregator. The feeds are grouped by source instead of by time, which is how they appear in many aggregators. This blogger stresses the importance of organization by time: how else will you know what’s new, right? It’s almost like the difference between watching a news wire and reading sections of a newspaper.
I can see the merits of both ways. I often find myself skimming my aggregator to find posts from a specific source and sometimes feel a little frustrated that they aren’t grouped together. I like Yahoo!’s organizational scheme. It’s more important to me to see what a certain source’s most recent post is than to know the chronological order of all the feeds in my aggregator.
But I’m guessing that someone’s preference for an organizational scheme may depend heavily on the number of subscriptions s/he has. I can imagine that if I subscribed to more than 33 feeds and two comics, it would take longer for me to go through my aggregator to see which sources have new content, especially if posts from all the sources were present and the aggregator was keeping a maximum number of posts from a maximum number of days. (In Yahoo!, you can have 25 feeds displaying ten headlines or summaries of posts from the last seven days.) Too bad there isn’t a way to group by source, then sort by most recent updates. All the posts from the same source would be together with the source that updated most recently at the top of the list.
How frequently someone reads their aggregator factors into this, too. On a typical day, I read mine once late in the evening. If I tapped it more frequently looking for new content, it would be more important to me to have things sorted in reverse chronological order so that I would know what’s new and what isn’t–a handy marker for knowing what I’ve already read. When I read my aggregator multiple times during the day, it is easy for me to notice which things I’ve already seen because the feeds are organized chronologically.
Should there really be only one way to do things? What’s wrong with trying something new? If we never tried organizing things differently, we’d never really know which methods work well and which ones don’t. (That’s why information/library science is a science–it’s the experimenting/trying new things. But that’s another long discussion for another time.)
(Initially, this was going to be an addendum on a post I made earlier today……er, Thursday evening about My Yahoo!’s new beta aggregator, but as I typed, I realized it should be its own post because I think it’s more worthy of discussion than I first thought. I’m hoping some of you people with more subscriptions than what I have will write what you think about aggregators’ organizational schemes.)
