ITP Thesis Week 2009
Monday, May 4 - Friday, May 8

4RSS.us

Sanjay Papinazath

RSS feed aggregator + networking w/o social obligations

www.4RSS.us



4RSS.us is an RSS feed aggregator which is customized by the user and also allows users to add friends so that they can view what friends are reading or watching. It allows users to follow other people with out the odd social aspects such as chatting, friend requests etc which are common among other similar sites.
This project also makes use of a simple interface without a million options to be configured before it is ready to be used.

Background
www.netvibe.com
www.digg.com
www.igoogle.com
http://www.google.com/reader/

Implementation
When on the computer for long periods of time one tends to drift towards social networks periodically to read or view updates about people that mostly do not effect them in any way even after reading the updates, therefore the concept I developed was to build a social network which focuses on sharing RSS feeds for reading, video, audio and sharing events for people to attend.
The social aspect is bare minimum as the sharing aspect is the main importance for this social network. This is due to the fact that the experience I am trying to give the users is different from the normal social networks where people connect to others and share pictures and wall posts, etc. That’s why sharing RSS feeds for various media may provide a more formal experience.
This network allows people to add “friends” whose feeds are interesting to you. Once you add a “friend” that person will not be alerted with a message, nor is there a “friend list” where your picture and id will be displayed. A user will also be able to “un-friend” a person when ever they want if they feel they have lost interest with that person and that person will not be notified you stopped following them. So like typical social networks this one does not require a user to follow certain ethics, which comes with traditional networks.
Users can add people at random if they want to follow their feed.
The aim here is to make this social network as simple as possible and have a very clean user centric user interface for people to comprehend on the first glance. The navigation is very simple and use minimal clicks to navigate from page to page.