On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 08:12:49PM -0000, James Holderness <[email protected]> wrote a message of 25 lines which said:
> Also, I'm curious what makes you think that most feed reading apps > today do sort by published date. Based on past research, I was of > the opinion that it was more like 25-30%. Until a few months ago, the program which produced the Atom feed for my blog did *not* sort the entries (the order was random), relying on the feed reader to do so. All the local feed readers I tested sorted by published date, as well as many of the big online feed readers. I found only two exceptions, two online readers, Netvibes and the iGoogle gadget (not Google Reader, which started to do the sorting one year ago). It was quite inconvenient for the users and I received several bug reports. They were forwarded to these organizations, which never replied. [In the end, I gave in and decided, in the name of the robustness principle, to do the sorting myself.] So, I would not call this "research" but "anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that sorting by <published> is the norm, not sorting the exception".
