News Time Line 1

Ok lets get started.

I was talking with a friend the other day about something we heard on the news, and we couldn’t understand what it was all about. It was something like “Mr. X. will be meeting with the ABC comity to discuss the future of XYZ.” And then there was this huge buzz around the subject, discussions, talk shows, confrontations … the works.

We thought Ok lets google it see what these initials mean. After a while we knew what the initials meant but we didn’t know how they were connected or what was the history behind them. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to view news through time?

So I started thinking, I even made a template of a website. It would have to be really easy to setup the search query (facebook style forms), present a nice graphical representation of time and news and of course be touch friendly. A horizontal line could be used for time since most people think of time as a linear process and boxes that represent the news with a title, a couple of lines summary and an image. Clicking on the image would pop up a nice modal dialog with the whole article or page. Since we don’t like scrolling the search would only present the top news within that period and maybe have a “Show More” button than would show more results in a tabular form.

There are of course solutions out there that allow you to search news and present them in chronological order. A good solution is google labs News Timeline. It allows you to create an advanced query and displays the results in a calendar style.