Looking Back: The NewsSort Feed Reader

I wanted to go back a little and look at a feed reader I created. It was developed early in 2003 if I remember correctly. At the time, I was an avid read of Techdirt. I still am, but back then, that was about the only news site I read on a daily basis. I was really interested in their Corporate Intelligence product and wanted to create something similar.

NewsSort created a social experience around news. Although it is not as open (socially) as digg.com, NewsSort allowed groups to be created with the group creator managing who had access. The thought was to have a company group where co-workers shared stories important to their industry, and communicating about them, which could include sensitive information that would be private to that group. Sounds web 1.0 doesn’t it?

Homepage

	Site stats
	Login
	Registration

Group Page

	Once you log in, you get a list of groups you are a member of

Create a new group

	You can create your own groups

Group Members

	As the admin of a group, you can manage who has access to it
	Typing in email addresses invites new people to your group

Group News

	Here is the actual news articles coming in based on selected RSS sources
	Each article can be saved to the groups library for later access and commenting
	Each group can have keywords that are set to filter the stories coming in

Selected Feeds for a Group

	These are the feeds you can choose to get news from. Of course, if I was to set this up today, that it would be open to any feed you wish to use
	There was a way to suggest a feed, so that was a start in the right direction

Group Keywords

	As mentioned above, each group can have keywords to that NewsSort could filter out items the group had no interest in. I mentioned this was inspired by Techdirt’s Corporate Intelligence, which uses real people to compile important stories for a company, so this was an attempt to emulate that.

Group Library

	Here is a list of stories added to the group’s library
	Various info of the story is shown here, such as; Date saved, number of comments, importance (as voted by the group) and category assigned

Story with Comments

	The story saved in the library
	The voting system used by the group members
	The comments left by the group members

It was fun to look back at this. There are a lot of projects I started in the early 00’s that I wish I had stuck with (like my online calendar!) and this is definitely one of them. I don’t even recall why I stopped working on this. How do you stay interested in your personal projects?

BTW, I use NewsHutch for collecting my daily news.