Tools: Open Source Why Do Rss Readers Look Like Email Clients?

There's a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It's not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It's more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There's no one there. There never was.

I've been thinking about this feeling for a long time. Longer than I probably should, given that it concerns something as mundane as reading articles on the internet. But I've come to believe that these small, repeated experiences shape us more than we like to admit.

So let me start with a question that's been nagging at me: why do RSS readers look like email clients?

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If you've used almost any RSS reader in the past two decades, you know this layout intimately. There's a sidebar with your feeds organized into folders. There's a list of items, sorted by date, with little dots indicating what you haven't read yet. There's a reading pane where the content appears when you click.

The shape is so ubiquitous that it feels inevitable. But of course nothing in design is inevitable. Someone made a choice, and then other people followed that choice, and eventually the choice calcified into convention.

I know exactly who made that first choice,because I asked.

His name is Brent Simmons. In 2002 he released NetNewsWire, the app that established the template nearly every RSS reader still follows today.

"I know the answer, or at least part of it. I wrote the first one of these. NetNewsWire Lite 1.0 was released in 2002, and it was the first RSS reader to resemble an email app."

Source: HackerNews