My older brother developed a more sophisticated version of this idea a decade ago and never released it to the public. You're showing successfully that the old internet 'dashboard' idea still hasn't died yet and I think it's valuable still.
The internet's content should be controlled by the individual, not the feeds a big reddit,hn or facebook gives you. Simple good tools like what you provided should be a good step in cultivating an internet garden that can integrate into people's lives in a more orderly fashion.
Would love to talk to your brother or hear more about this tool. Fraidycat is definitely quite simple on the surface - which might be an advantage, but I am also curious what 'sophistications' could be brought in.
Mostly on the design side that fit a high quality mid 2000s perspective. The next step for content aggregation is tiered ranking of qualitative properties of each news piece. I have a few ideas on what might provide that but it is not a fully formed thought yet.
Yeah, I'm pushing back hard on algorithms and ranking here. Not sure if that's what you mean. I like that it is a dumb tool that isn't doing any concealed magic. It's absolutely apparent how it ranks things. It's then up to the human to explore and curate and shape from there.
However, I do see a place for search. I would love to add search terms like 'Nicholas Cage' and any time his name comes up (or perhaps even a related topic) I can track that.
The internet's content should be controlled by the individual, not the feeds a big reddit,hn or facebook gives you. Simple good tools like what you provided should be a good step in cultivating an internet garden that can integrate into people's lives in a more orderly fashion.