Here's what Dave Winer wrote about this:
River of News is a kind of RSS aggregator.
Items are presented in reverse-chronologic order.
Each item has a headline, short description, a link to the story, links to the website and feed it came from, a link to its enclosure if it has one, when it was published, when it appeared in the river.
- No full text of articles
- No feature images
- No unread counts: Newsrivers are meant to be used like a Twitter feed. No hard feelings if you miss something.
Why not use Dave's reader implementation?
I tried! But it is really hard to use. Large part of the frontend is served from obscure hard-coded websites such as fargo.io which don't even bother to support HTTPS. I wanted to have the entire frontend being part of the app. As of now, the app is still using the davereader package to aggregate the RSS feeds, but I am planning to re-implement that part as well.
- get rid of
davereaderdependency - swipe left and right should switch feeds
- make header nav float smartly with the content (but only appear on scroll-up)
- better documentation
- example implementation