I've just re-installed Firefox 1.5. NewsMonster.org broke
it. Silly me, I wanted to try it and didn't notice the site was last updated 3
years ago and the requirements state Mozilla 1.0. I don't know how well did it
work in Firefox 1.0, but it screws 1.5 completely.
Two things come out of this. First, Firefox should have a better way to handle
software that it's not prepared for it and will break it. Second, I don't get
why someone can create a software application that breaks in future hosts and
abandon it in favor of not one, but two different projects that seem exactly
the same at first sight.
I found out about NewsMonster yesterday when reading this post by Kevin Burton
on the new acquisition of Yahoo!, WebJay. He mentions TailRank.com, one of his
aggregator projects. And from there I got to Rojo.com and NewsMonster.org.
I'm still trying to find out what works best for me as an RSS aggregator. I
don't buy much on the idea of having it all on a web page just yet, so I wanted
to try NewsMonster first. Well, you know what happened.
I'm willing to give a chance to the web applications because I know they won't
break my browser. But I’m starting wondering what the real difference between
them is and already thinking that rss.searchfox.com have better intentions. That means
that without having a clue, I already choose a winner just because they didn’t treat
me bad.
Morale: don't go around up starting new stuff hoping to be acquired by some big
company to get rich and forget about your users. You'll never win that way.
One extra though on the ‘don’t have a clue’. I’m finding
difficult to understand what all these new web applications are about. May be
it’s just me, but I think they should try to improve their communication. I want
to know what is good in them in practical words, not marketing ones. I want to
understand what all is about without thinking too much. I want it to be
intuitive. There is a lack of intuitiveness on the web.