April 24, 2003

Give me options or give me death

Paolo agrees with Dave - I still don't get it.

Both of them are saying exactly the same thing. "This *thing* should work exactly *this* way because that's what makes the most sense based on my experiences" - which completely misses on of the coolest points about aggregation.

Good aggregation allows users to round up large quantities of content and deal with that content on the users own terms.

Personally, I aggregate in many different ways. My blogroll is set to aggregate publishing pings, my sidebar aggregates three very different feeds and publishes out the headlines by source (I don't want "Sidewalk Chalk" chocolate in my "World Tour" peanut butter). Newzcrawler keeps track of tens of feeds for me and stores them in nice little folders that I can deal with on a number of levels - chronologically, by source or by keyword.

There's a lot more to aggregation in my life than what happens inside of Newzcrawler (or Radio is Paolo's) and the flexibility is what I value most.

More choices, not less, provide strong value to customers. Honing in on one specific mechanism that organizes things this way or that way simply means that you are comfortable making a bet that your users will see things the same way.

I guess I just don't see it the same way.

Posted by ross at 07:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack