The "Feedization" Of The Text User Interface

Most blogs are multi-column (two or three) web pages with a single column of posts organized in chronological order.

Most feeds are delivered the same way minus the extra columns.

This is a technique taken (at least from my vantage point) from the news feeds and other information feeds of the financial markets.

We used to call it a bulletin board system.

Not we call it a blog or a feed.

Most people who have grown up designing magazines or newspapers probably look at this user interface and think of it as ugly and boring.

But I think its super efficient (like the single search field on google.com).

And I think we’ll see two trends, at least in online publishing.

– more and more text oriented content will be organized in this manner

– feeds and blogs will look more and more alike.  there will come a time when you are reading a feed in a reader and you will think you are reading the blog in a browser.

I am not sure whether the feeds wil move more toward the blog style or the blogs will move more toward the feed style, but I feel pretty strongly that we’ll see the two start to merge in the coming year or two.

I have always felt that function wins out over form in mediums where such things can be measured.