Sneak Preview: my.info

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Hello all! I'd like to tell you about a site that I've been working on
recently. It's not quite ready yet for public consumption (I just started
programming it on Monday), but it does most of what I want it to. It's
called my.info and it's at:

http://my.theinfo.org

If you click on the subscribe link (and sign up) you're given a choice of 42
different news sites. Currently the list is pretty technology-centric --
that may change as time goes on. You select the sites that you're interested
in and whenever they have a new story it's added to your personal my.info
page. (Click "View Info" at the top of the page to view your page.)

Right now, it only supports sites that syndicate in RSS. Soon, I hope to
support sites that don't publish in RSS as well as a wealth of other
choices. Of course, it will support the changedPage spec as soon as people
start using it. If you'd like to track a site that supports RSS, but isn't
in my list, you can submit it at:

http://my.theinfo.org/publisher/rss-add.adp

I'd appreciate your feedback on the site, but don't go telling everyone
about it quite yet. I don't know if my small server is able to handle the
load. I hope to move it to a more powerful server that I'll be receiving
soon. If there are any feature requests, bug reports or questions, I'd love
to hear them.

I'd also like to thank Dave and UserLand for pioneering this field with
My.UserLand and SalonHerringWiredFool. You'll probably notice the
similarities between my.info and My.UserLand, except that my.info is a lot
more personalized. Plans for the site include being able to "watch" a URL
and be notified when it's updated, as well as creating RSS files for a
number of sites that don't yet have them. Perhaps eventually, we'll even do
email!

I want to keep everything open and I plan to develop XML-RPC interfaces to
allow people to build there own front-ends to my.info and tie into the
my.info news flow. If you have any ideas or suggestions for applications
that could be connected into the site, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and comments,

-- 
Aaron Swartz <aswartz@upclink.com>|       <http://theinfo.org>
<http://www.swartzfam.com/aaron/> | tomorrow is our permanent address
 AIM: Jedi of Pi | ICQ: 33158237  |        - Marshall McLuhan