Friday, July 1, 2011

Jetslide - geeky queries, mobile and personalized news

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

I had tweeted about Jetslide earlier. It's sort of a real-time news site for hacker-related news. Very roughly like hackerstream.com and Peter Cooper (@peterc)'s hackerslide.com, both of which I had also
tweeted about earlier.

Just got an invite to Jetslide.

Excerpts from the email and from the links in it:

[
You can jetslide anonymously but also get some benefits when you login.
...
With Jetsli.de you get the latest news out of twitter, hackernews, delicious, dzone, reddit and digg. The algorithm of jetslide will boost articles with a higher share count (retweets or diggs etc.) and tries really hard to avoid that you'll waste your time e.g. it reduces
duplicates and spam!
...
At the moment the following read modes are available:
Daily: Every 24h Jetslide marks your topics as read.
Auto: Automatically marks your topics as read when you click on the next topic.
...
Read the news on your mobile device like Android.
...
Use geeky queries like e.g. "elasticsearch^2 OR solr" which boosts articles containing elasticsearch.
...
To get posts directly sorted against the share count of one network
you can append the sort parameter, e.g. sort=reddit.com will give you the articles from reddit and sorted against the share count of reddit.
...
Last but not least you can get articles from an url or in this example via domain:
domain:techcrunch.com
]

Seems like an interesting attempt. I think we need more such "geeky query"-type search services :-)

Some time ago I had tweeted (in reply, IIRC, to a tweet by Stormy Peters - @storming), that Gmail should have an SQL-style search facility. (Stop for 1 minute to imagine what you could do with that.) So should other services that provide any kind of search.

The current search facilities, while of some use, are not enough. Of course, initially only technical people would be able to use new facilities such as SQL-style queries, but I don't think it's such a big deal for laymen to learn it. After all, SQL was originally invented - by IBM - with the goal of being an end-user query language (as I had blogged on my earlier blog, jugad's Journal - link below), and though that goal did not really work out - instead, SQL became a programmers' language - nowadays, with vastly greater computer awareness and skills in the general population, I don't see why they should not be able to pick up SQL, at least for basic to intermediate uses.

Earlier blog post about SQL being originally designed for end-users:

IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript - will the wheel come full circle?
http://jugad.livejournal.com/143125.html

Links about Jetslide and its maker:

http://www.pannous.info/products/jetslide-mobile-and-personal-news4geeks/

http://www.pannous.info/products/

Posted via email.
- Vasudev Ram

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