
CmdrTaco's Trove - keveman
http://trove.com
======
muppetman
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

(For you youngun's who don't get the joke:
[http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-
ip...](http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod))

~~~
habitue
That's... not really a joke is it? You just kind of quoted him, and then
helpfully provided a source.

~~~
xmonkee
Its a long running meme on slashdot. The original quote serves as a good
example of how people most close to tech often have different views on it than
its consumers.

~~~
rmc
It is also an example of how the technically superior product doesn't always
win.

~~~
OverlordXenu
Because industrial design and UX doesn't matter when stacked against a spec
list?

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Intermernet
Because a spec list doesn't matter compared to the marketing engine that is
Apple. Many superior products fell afoul of that.

~~~
Pxtl
Before the iPod/iMac, Apple didn't _have_ that marketing engine. They didn't
have that stellar reputation. They built that from _nothing_ with a single
generation of products.

Today, Apple occupies a special place in the market that very few players
could approach. In 2000? That market was wide open for anybody who could get
their crap together and do the same things Apple did - well-designed products
with a good marketing campaign. The PC industry was only just starting to
abandon the ugly beige metal boxes.

~~~
hackbinary
Now, 14 years later, we have ugly black boxes.

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dasil003
I'm going to go ahead and say the obvious asshole comment:

I thought when he retired from Slashdot it was because he wanted to do
something different.

~~~
sentenza
Ok, I'm not sure if I still can do this. Let's try:

In Soviet Russia, Slashdot retires you?

~~~
furyg3
I, for one, welcome our new pensioned overlords.

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timlin
If only HN had numeric user IDs... We could have another low user id contest!

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mcdoh
Ha! Your account was created just 21 days ago!

~~~
alex_c
Hi.

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danieljh
Read the privacy policy first:
[http://info.trove.com/policies](http://info.trove.com/policies)

One of the sad facts: "We do not honor Do Not Track requests."

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guptaneil
Maybe I'm missing something, but how is this different than Flipboard?

It looks like it allows me to browse articles shared by friends and experts I
choose to follow, exactly like Twitter + Flipboard.

~~~
JeroenRansijn
My thoughts exactly. Seems a lot like Flipboard.

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robbles
This looks nice, but I'm not sure the solution to the overwhelming amount of
content out there is more curation. I can't see myself having the time to
build the perfect set of "troves".

Instead, I'd like to see more automated filtering of the many streams I
_already_ have. I think Summify was on the right track here (before they were
acquired).

~~~
pit
I couldn't agree more. The curated internet is a terrible trend -- it
encourages mindless, constant, and immediate consumption and discourages
exploration (except safely between the lines of your preferred content
aggregator).

~~~
codezero
I agree. What things or kinds of things go against this trend?

~~~
pit
I wish I had more examples, but all I can really think of is the fact that
sites still offer RSS feeds for reading articles.

~~~
codezero
Yeah, it's hard to come up with good examples. RSS itself isn't even a great
exploration mechanism for finding stuff outside of a single site.

Thinking back to the good old days, my main forms of discovery were IRC,
Usenet (with its underlying structure it made it easy to dig into
weird/different niches at will)...

A few things were consistent about these mechanisms: Each one allowed you to
start in a specific niche/community, explore outside of it and become
entrenched in wider/more diverse communities/interests.

They had some basic structure (channels on IRC, top level groups on Usenet),
some form of curation/moderation (channel operators, news server admins who
could white/blacklist content, rules/guidelines about cross-posting, some
proactive moves against spam/off topic trolling), but ultimately were "open."

Anyone could get their foot in with some basic software, anyone could add
their voice, and engage either with a group of people or one-on-one.

~~~
pit
Oh, sorry -- I thought you were talking about ways to subscribe to
stories/articles, rather than forms of discovery.

These days, about 70% of my exploration online starts at HN. There's a bit
from Kottke and Coudal, a couple of Twitter feeds, and various music labels
(Stone's Throw, Mad Decent).

Is Delicious the answer? It's got tags for bookmarks _and_ discovery -- there
go two of the HN front page stories from this past week. Remap Ctrl-D in
Chrome, and I don't think you'll find a better, more open solution for the Web
out there.

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mootpointer
I may be dense, but this does seem like a slow follower to Prismatic and co.
It's interesting in a way: kind of pretty, but it doesn't seem like it's going
to change my world.

Of course, I half expect to be proven wrong because I've now voiced my doubts.

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incision
Heard about this the other day, gave it a try, didn't see any value in it.

Most importantly, as far as I can tell, there's no way to share an arbitrary
link. If you create a new trove it's a requirement to specify an existing
trove as a source - your "picks" from the source troves comprise the newly
created trove.

Therefore, users can't share and curate so much as sift and sort what the
editors have already deemed worthwhile. Apparently, the only recourse for
seeing specific content added is sending an email [0].

0: [http://info.trove.com/faq#sources](http://info.trove.com/faq#sources)

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bigsassy
Two things. One, the title is a little misleading. Trove existed before
CmdrTaco joined WaPo. Second, when it was owned by WaPo it had a nifty API.
I'm not sure if that's still true (the WaPo API page still exists):

[http://apiportal.washingtonpost.com/api/trove](http://apiportal.washingtonpost.com/api/trove)

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crb
_> "Trove is a digital news innovation group within Graham Holdings (formerly
The Washington Post Company)."_

Does this mean: Bezos bought the WaPo, the parent company rebranded, CmdrTaco
works for the old owners, and thus is not affiliated with the WaPo any more?

~~~
acheron
Yes. Bezos did not buy the whole "Washington Post Company", only the parts of
it related to the actual newspaper. So "Graham Holdings" is what was left that
Bezos did not buy.

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JohnTHaller
iOS only. No Android. There's a very tiny "or sign in on the web" link below
the iOS button.

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meerita
It's sad there's no Android version. I hope they build it soon.

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bashcoder
> The best news stories picked by people who share your interests.

This will be a success only to the extent that it fosters a diversification of
voices. If all it does is to create more ideological group-think news bubbles,
then it's just more of the same for a culture obsessed with self-selecting
their news, and hearing only the viewpoints that they already agree with.

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debacle
Was "echochamber.com" already taken?

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trove_tester
Web version needs a lot of work. It's really slow, freezes when going back and
reloads all assets all the time.

~~~
chris_wot
It's like an early version of Slashdot!

~~~
mortyseinfeld
Is Taco still hacking Perl?

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blakesterz
Ya ever feel like all us bloggers were the miners during the 1990s blog gold
rush? CmdrTaco and all of us turned out to be the miners, Matt Mullenweg and
Dries Buytaert turned out to be Levi Strauss. I'm not sure if Trove and all
the similar things are shovels, or just some nuggets.

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matznerd
Looks similar to Circa?

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revnja
iOS only? Sorry. Fail.

~~~
jsankey
There's a web version too. Besides which: they just launched, so have
presumably just decided to support iOS first (seems sensible to me).

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haraball
This sounds like how I use Twitter, by following people that links to stuff
I'm interested in.

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nemof
well at least he's continuing the tradition of butt-ugly websites.

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grandalf
looks cool. hoping it's subway (no network connection) friendly!

