The social-media-like interface

There's a feeling you get when you are building something that you're very passionate about that can haunt you if you let it: "What if someone else makes something [similar / better / faster]?" It's a particular brand of imposter syndrome that will be familiar to anyone who has ever written1 an "Introducing X" blog post or tweet. I just published one such blog post this morning, announcing the launch of @hypertexting.com for iPhone on the App Store. 🎉 It's exciting and scary at the same time. But it almost didn't happen. I have never felt the aforementioned fear more acutely than this past January when Terry Godier (@terrygodier.com) published an essay called "Phantom Obligation": Why do RSS readers look like email clients? If you've used almost any RSS reader in the past two decades, you know this layout intimately. There's a sidebar with your feeds organized into folders. There's a list of items, sorted by date, with little dots indicating what you haven't read yet. There's a…