The Digg engineering and product blog covers the site's tech choices, its RSS reader, and data from its users.
HN links its survey showing most IE6 users cannot upgrade, plus its Cassandra and Reader posts; one commenter questions Digg Reader's promised API.
And so the wheel turns...
Some choice quotes from the launch of Digg Reader:
> "Free products on the Internet don’t have a great track record. They tend to disappear, leaving users in a lurch. We need to build a product that people can rely on and trust will always be there for them." [0]
From a Wired slobbery puff piece:
> "The Digg team certainly has a shot at cracking that nut; their progress so far is astonishing, and their relentless enthusiasm makes you almost believe they can accomplish anything. But they also might melt the wax on their wings, come crashing down into the hard crust of the real world, and lose an astonishing amount of money. It almost doesn’t matter." [1]
From Gizmodo:
> "Where Google set us adrift, Digg threw us a life-preserver. While it's exciting to see what the future might hold, right now, it's nice enough just to have our heads above water." [2]
And the prize for winning HN comment from 2013 goes to @nothxbro:
> "It looks good, but I am wary of using any of these guys stuff based on how fast they 'pivot' and shut things down." [3]
0: http://blog.digg.com/post/49264812779/were-still-learning
1: https://www.wired.com/2013/06/inside_digg_reader/
2: https://gizmodo.com/digg-reader-hands-on-your-google-reader-life-raft-is-h-530930770
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5894290
I agree with the suggestion to drop IE. If someone is willing to dedicate enough time to play through a Civ game, they're probably not at work and probably willing to install a third party browser, so you're not sacrificing too much potential "market share," and saving yourself some grief; assuming Canvas performance is sufficient on FF3/Safari4.
Some other suggestions:
* Investigate multipart XHR
http://blog.digg.com/?p=621
This is "bleeding edge" and may not, in the end, work, but it'd be worth looking at the work Digg has done w/ multipart XmlHttpRequests (cramming multiple objects/files into a single XHR). The demo they've posted works pretty well in non-IE browsers and it looks like they've laid the foundations for supporting COMET-like delivery of objects over a single request, and have thought about how to address client side caching of objects.
* Business model?
Is this just an OSS project or an attempt to build a business (or both)? I could imagine a small business that might generate enough $ to pay some coder/admins & some freelance graphic artists to work on the open source part of the code by providing easy-to-set-up on demand game servers for multi-player FreeCiv games, perhaps w/ a sister set of web apps for collecting game stats/organizing games/etc.
Good luck!
"RSS industry"?!
I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them.
One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor.
Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so.
Neither is it a commentary on standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived interests, something companies are wont to do.
As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity:
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-with-full-width-support/
http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur
http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader
When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be skeptic.
From their original blog post I had an impression that they will try to mirror Google Reader's API and features:
"We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API)"[1]
Now they haven't mentioned API at all, they haven't replied to a question about Reeder, and they did put quite a lot of focus on their web and mobile apps.
A conclusion I draw from this is that they don't want to be a dumb syncing API, and just like Twitter, they want to control the clients (their own apps).
[1] http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader
1) Correct
2) Also correct, not sure why this is an issue
3) Their blog does have an RSS feed - http://blog.digg.com/rss do you mean an anchor link for subscribing? I can't recall I used one of those instead of the RSS icon in the address bar.
Additionally, Digg - the product, like HN, Reddit etc was never going to be a substitute for Reader. The product they are currently working on sounds like a direct replacement for Reader with a social slant. Seems like the most sensible move for them to become relevant again.
Cassandra has the features you are looking for, including adding nodes as needed, and is starting to get a bunch of success stories outside of its original authors (facebook). Digg, for instance, has 9TB across 12 machines. They wrote some articles about it at http://arin.me/code/wtf-is-a-supercolumn-cassandra-data-model and http://blog.digg.com/?p=966.
(I work for rackspace and we have an internal app going live on Cassandra in the coming days. But it doesn't technically qualify for "in production" yet.)