I went to NYC yesterday, drove both ways in the same day, which is a lot of driving. It was exceptional for me, two big cities in three weeks, Ottawa and New York. Had time to sit in Washington Square Park, then I rode a Citibike up to where I used to live near Columbus Circle. On the way I shot a video of a woman on West St with a sign that said Honk For Democracy. I thought it was a nice shot, and typically NYers drove right by her, no honking, unfortunately. I also shot a video in Washington Square Park. NYC is photogenic, interesting, and still where I come from, proudly.#I went to see a discussion between Matt Mullenweg and John Borthwick, two people from tech who I have worked with, but hadn't seen in a while. I wanted to chat with both of them, and did, which was well-worth the journey. I liveblogged it. My chat with Matt helped me understand what we're doing. One of the things we talked about is an idea I thought he would understand and love. It relates to their podcasting client, Pocket Casts, which I use. #
- On its surface Pocket Casts is a straightforward podcasting client. You use it on a mobile device to subscribe to shows, choose the ones you want to listen to, those go into a queue, you can move things up the list, or start another, etc. #
- It also has a web client you can use to add and remove subscriptions, from your desktop. This is important because we discover podcasts on the desktop too. In your normal web surfing you may see a podcast you want to follow. Then how many steps does it take to add that to your subscription list on your phone? That's the trick in software design, is it too much work to justify the benefit? If it is, you won't do it. But if we can make it easy, as easy as subscribing to a news feed, you might. Ideally it should be one click followed by a confirmation.#
- How could this work? A new feature for OPML subscription lists. Today it's used as the import/export format for lists. But that's a one-time thing. Instead I want to give Pocket Casts the URL of an OPML file with my podcast subscriptions from the desktop.#
- I decided to write up this idea publicly because I've written about the idea so many times, it's not a secret and if I had a podcast client it would already be there. If people at Automattic are excited by the potential, let's start planning the feature, and software that can plug in on the other side of the interface. I'm still learning how this works, to collaborate with a very diverse organization, spread all over the world, and they don't even all work for the same company. #
- If we do this feature, first it'll be largely experimental, something that podcast-loving devs will make for ourselves. As we use it we will think of ways to make it easier to use. It won't take long imho before this is a popular feature in podcast clients.#