Tailrank River and Megite News River now face some stiff competition from Techmeme, a hugely popular technology news aggregator.
Gabe Rivera, the one man army of Techmeme, just announced the launch of Techmeme News River that will showcase all the top stories that are currently on the Techmeme front page.
Unlike the original Techmeme.com page, this river page is free of blogs that are just linking to the main story. It's like a long list of headlines but you can also see stories from the previous days arranged in reverse chronological order like blogs.
Thanks Gabe. Techmeme is now even more useful with the latest feature - River of News Presentation. There are a few things that may further improve the the overall experience:
1. A short summary of the posts as we see inside Techmeme.com - This summary may be hidden by default and readers may expand/collapse depending on their personal preferences.
2. While the results are sorted by date based on the river news principle, how about a small indicator with each story that shows the importance or significance of the story - we can base the importance of a story on the number of blogs linking to that post or whether A-list and influential bloggers are citing the story.
3. An easy-to-remember permanent link for river news pages, one for each day. For instance, if someone likes to see the river newspage for Dec 10, 2006, he could just type techmeme.com/river/12-10-2006 or something on those lines.
For readers - what do you think of Techmeme, Tailrank and Megite - which site in your opinion has a better news river implementation ?