Integrating Reading And Writing Tools

re IndieWebReader, Unified Recent Changes, RssAggregator.... It's (2014) not the first time I've seen either one, but maybe the first time I was thinking about both of them within the same couple days: FedWiki's Wiki Neighborhood Unified Recent Changes, and the IndieWebReader efforts.

My immediate (2014) concerns are:

• doesn't it make sense to do more with RSS before re-inventing the wheel? Note that (most) IndieWeb sites and SFW both Fail to provide RSS feeds!
• does this increase the amount and complexity of software that needs to be written and installed in a single user's server instance?
• doesn't this impose a single set of Tightly Coupled design decisions on the user, rather than letting them Mix And Match tools from varying people?
• worst of all, in the case of SFW, this doesn't even integrate with other wikis (I'm 99% sure)!

Another tangent: I never understood why Yahoo didn't treat the My Yahoo news-portal more like an RssAggregator (not calling it that, but working the same way). I suspect they felt that focusing on a smaller number of "popular" channels provided a greater sense of comfort to their lowest-common-denominator user.

Probably the biggest argument in favor of this bundling is the success of Social Networking silos like FaceBook and Twitter (and TumblR) over the loose RSS network. Having discovery-by-reference integrated into Following (Subscribing) and then Reading provided a relatively self-explanatory user experience. (On the other-other hand, Twitter seems to be spending a lot of effort on trying to improve the new-user experience, so maybe that's not really true. On the other-other-other hand, maybe that becomes necessary once you're hitting the more mainstream part of the Adoption Life Cycle...)

This bundled approach is probably more justifiable for SFW, given that it's focused on a more integrated network of name-matching (and -forking) content than a WebLog network is (esp as MetaTag-s have fallen out of favor in blogging).

I should probably sketch out how an RssAggregator might handle blogs and wikis (and maybe Twitter also)...