release

I’m in what seems to be a tiny minority when I say that I use Kinja as my primary newsfeed reader. I’ve preferred it to other methods for a few reasons.

First, I like that it’s web-based. I read weblogs and news sources from at least three different systems: my laptop, my desk-bound monstrosity at work, and when I’m out and about, my Treo 650. For those of you playing along at home, that’s three different operating systems. Web-based means platform-neutral, portable, and sync-free.

Second, Kinja is manageable. Newsreader clients like NewsFire or NetNewsWire are slick and pretty, but launching either one means several minutes of massive bandwith and CPU power reallocation, as the newsreaders update hundreds of feeds, resulting in thousands of unread items. Kinja, by contrast, is always ready to go with a page-long summary of the latest feeds. And it works just like the web works - read, scroll, point, click, read. I never have to struggle to remember which function keys navigate among the various feeds and feed items.

Third, Kinja gives me just the right amount of information. Kinja gives me web-page sized helpings of newsfeeds, laid out right in front of me with headlines and just enough of the “fat” feed for me to see at a glance whether I want to read further. Very little clutter, very little to distract from the pure flow of the feeds.

Kinja’s been down for a few days for what I thought was simple maintenance. As it turns out, they were apparently scrubbing the whole thing down with Ajax. Now, next to the pure feeds on the left, the whole right section is filled with the “cards” of the weblogs providing the feeds. The cards are the primary input device for - you guessed it - tags, the magic ingredient for every web application since mid-2005, no matter how simple.

Got an image? Tag it. Blog post? Tag it. News feed? Tag it. Dog running loose without a collar? Tag it. Releasing a falcon into the wild? Tag it. Three-day-old pizza on your kitchen counter? Dude, throw that out already! But tag the box.

I suppose tags are here to stay until we invent a new classification paradigm, and they can surely be useful in many circumstances. But for Kinja to pop up, new, improved, and tag-enabled, feels a bit like trend-following to me. I’m not sure they make Kinja any more useful than it was before, and there’s definitely some drawback. What used to be uncluttered and pure now has a spray of cards and tags strewn about the page. Even worse, the tags have only been available for a day and already some cretin has spammed the database with a bunch of “poker” tags. Not sure how that helps the real poker sites, but spammers don’t need a reason to poop in the soup. That’s just what they do.

I’ll keep using Kinja, since it still seems simpler and less cluttered than other web-based options, but the friction preventing me from migrating elsewhere has suddenly become a lot less than it was.