PC Magazine -- April 9, 1996

The Gate: fishWrap

Michael W. Muchmore

It's far less customizable than most of the other services we reviewed, but fishWrap, a Web-based custom news page offered by The Gate (a joint Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle and theSan Francisco Examiner). fishWrap is a pioneer among newspaper Web sites. It uses technology developed by MIT Media Lab's News in the Future project; it looks good, costs nothing, and is quite useful.

All the news in fishWrap comes from the AP wire and you don't get keyword search tools or e-mail notification. There are only two ways to customize fishWrap: by geographic region and by topic. After you've given fishWrap your location, it can produce a hometown news section in your custom paper with stories for your city and state. You'll also receive a standard selection of national and international topics.

To customize by topic, you create named sections for your personal paper, which you populate with choices from a list of about 70 topics. The list has some interesting and offbeat topics but isn't comprehensive. Basics like politics and technology were missing, and the topics have a San Francisco Bay area slant. You can add or delete sections and topics at any time, and a filter lets you exclude sports news from any section.

When you access fishWrap to check on your personal news, the first thing you see is Page One. This page, essentially a communal news board, is the same for all users, and any user can nominate a fishWrap story for all other users to see there. To view your own custom sections, you click on Generate New Edition. This takes you to the sections page, which shows your hometown news and custom sections, with links to your chosen topics. Clicking on a topic brings up a list of hyperlinked story headlines, each followed by the first 40 or so words of the article; clicking on a headline brings up the full text. Articles remain accessible for 48 hours after they're posted. We found that topics were generally well filtered, although irrelevant stories did crop up.

fishWrap is decidedly on the light side compared with many other services. But it's a start, it's free, and the interface is well designed.

fishWrap. List price: Free. The Gate, San Francisco, CA; 415-777-7677; http://www.sfgate.com.

Suitability to Task

fishWrap

Ease of setup        Good
Customizability      Poor
Quality of delivery  Fair

Topic Strength

U.S. news            ***
World news           **
Business             *
Sports               ***
Arts & entertainment **
Technology           **