• Blogging

Circa and RSS

http://scripting.com/2014/07/23/wheresCircasRssFeed.html

For more than a year, I think, I've been accessing Circa news via their Twitter page.

https://twitter.com/CircaNews

But since I finally got with the times and acquired a smartphone last month, June 2014, I use the Circa app, and I enjoy it significantly better.

I believe Circa founded itself as a media org to be consumed on mobile devices, especially phones. Snippets or cards of short, concise stories that focus on facts. Minimalistic. For detailed info, I would visit a corresponding Wikipedia page if one exists or a Vox page if one exists.

I like Circa's idea and format. With the app, I can follow stories, such as the Malaysian airline shot down over Ukraine and the current Tour De France.

Circa continues to update the original story as new information accumulates. The app sends a push notification about new updates to stories that I follow.

Before the app, I would have preferred a Circa RSS feed over their Twitter page. But with the iPhone app, I can't see any other way of consuming content from Circa, and I think that's what Circa intended. I won't get the same experience from an RSS feed, so I don't need it.

Vox updates explainer pages. I need to see if they provide an app with push notifications for updates on stories that interest me.

Updating the same page is nothing new. Wikipedia has done this for a while. It's nice to see media adopt the idea, instead of creating a new article every day for an on-going story because new information becomes available.

With digital, it makes more sense to update the original story. And with more people consuming content over phones, it makes sense to provide the push notification feature for updated stories.

If Circa provides an RSS feed, the feed would have to be based upon changes or modified date and not creation date. Otherwise, new updates to an old story would not appear in the feed if the feed is sorted like a blog in descending, creation-date order.

The Circa Twitter page / feed lags well behind the content published through their mobile app, and this too is probably by design. And it's possible that some Circa stories do not get syndicated to their Twitter page. I'll look at this some more.

Anyway, for what Circa is trying to do, the mobile app experience is superior to a Twitter page and an RSS feed if it existed.

Blogging

Dave Winer snarkily said:

Why don't you just publish all of Circa on Medium then?

Winer gets Circa people to respond, and then Winer mistreats them with simple-minded commentary.

First, a person should read about Circa's business philosophy and evaluate the free Circa news app, and then provide intelligent, constructive criticism, instead of shouting at people and demanding that a tech media company implement a feature just because it's old and proven. RSS may not make sense for every situation.

http://blog.cir.ca/2014/04/01/at-circa-we-write-stories-not-summaries-take-two/

Winer commented again:

[Circa] probably had similar logic that said people don't ead news on the desktop and laptop computers, so we don't need a web interface. Now they have one.

Really? I did not know that Circa had a web interface. And I now I don't care that they do. I don't see how their web interface can provide the experience that I enjoy with their mobile app.

I like the web a lot. I still prefer web over apps but not in all situations. I still use Facebook's mobile web interface on my iPhone instead of their app, but I only access Facebook occasionally.

But I enjoy the Instagram phone app.

Basically, I like both: web and native apps. Whichever gives me the experience that I want, that's what I use. But I don't like downloading an app for every web site or web service.

So if the site does not display well on the phone with responsive web design, then I move on. The only exception is news.ycombinator.com. I tolerate, to a point, that site's lame look on the iPhone.

Based upon Circa's business model, the RSS feed idea and their web interface make little sense.

Dave wrote:

I've been doing fine without Circa.

And now that I use the Circa phone app, I've been doing great without anything else that Circa provides or may provide, web-wise.

Circa's website is http://cir.ca and I don't see a stream of news story links.

https://medium.com/circa/why-circa-doesnt-have-rss-b67b651a5857 - Jul 23, 2014 - By Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of Circa.

... so why don’t we use RSS? The reasons were many, but I’ll try to dive into just a few of them here:

Circa doesn’t publish traditional articles
RSS has traditionally been used for websites that publish articles. Those articles get sent out stripped of rich formatting and are easily consumed in “RSS readers.” Because most web publications follow the traditional article format, this makes a lot of sense. However, Circa doesn’t begin to adhere to a traditional article format and that’s where things get a bit more difficult.

Yep. Makes sense, especially after spending time with Circa's mobile app. I'm guessing that Dave has not tried Circa's phone app.

#media - #mobile - #app - #rss - #design