Rivers are a reverse-chronologic view of news from multiple sources. Twitter is a river, although rivers predate Twitter. Rivers actually predate the Internet. A teletype is a river of news.
The tabbed river is more or less what it sounds like. An array of tabs across the top of the page, one for each river.
I've started my tabbed river out with five streams: The Olympics, TechMeme, my own personal river, New Orleans and Berkman. Each had previously been on its own page. I would have to remember to go to each. And when I pointed to one, no one got to find out that the others exist. So now my news-gathering routine is both broader and more efficient. I get to keep up with several streams as easily as it used to be to keep up with one.
