And yet most of our feed readers are still pretty dumb. There is a lot of opportunity for improving the feed experience.
I love Google Reader; it is my primary feed reader. However, there are a few things about and every other reader that I have tried which really really bothers me:
It doesn't filter my feeds for me. I have to click through every story on every feed. Otherwise the feed counts go sky high and things get buried. There has got to be a better way.
First of all, I want clustering. If two articles with similar words from two sites about the same topic have a link to the same target, then there is a pretty good chance I don't need to read that story twice. Sort that out for me Google News style :-)
Second, I want to be able to differentiate between "I want to read everything" vs "I like to read these when I have time". Right now, I read EVERYTHING that comes in through Google Reader. When that "inbox" is empty, I hit sites like reddit and HN. I just skim the front page and find some stuff to entertain me. Then, I move on. I do something similar with Facebook feeds, although I sometimes miss feed items from my best friends when I want to see EVERYTHING (or at least all their shares and comments; stuff they want replies to). We need a way for casual-reading style feeds to be integrated with our "must read" feeds.
I think it's important to consider Fred's clarification in the comments section: "when i say "feeds" I don't really mean RSS/google reader/blogines/netvibes they are part of what i am talking about, but just a part of it the facebook news feed is the biggest thing out there today in terms of aggregating info you'll likely care about and that's a very mainstream service. twitter and the smart aggregators like techmeme and hacker news are also a big part of what i am talking about and they are also easier to consume than RSS for the mainstream user. i am sorry i wasn't more clear about that in my post."
So I think Fred's point is simply that there is a trend towards using feeds for finding relevant stuff on the web over search. And that there might be monetization opportunities latching onto that trend.
Comments
And yet most of our feed readers are still pretty dumb. There is a lot of opportunity for improving the feed experience.
I love Google Reader; it is my primary feed reader. However, there are a few things about and every other reader that I have tried which really really bothers me:
It doesn't filter my feeds for me. I have to click through every story on every feed. Otherwise the feed counts go sky high and things get buried. There has got to be a better way.
First of all, I want clustering. If two articles with similar words from two sites about the same topic have a link to the same target, then there is a pretty good chance I don't need to read that story twice. Sort that out for me Google News style :-)
Second, I want to be able to differentiate between "I want to read everything" vs "I like to read these when I have time". Right now, I read EVERYTHING that comes in through Google Reader. When that "inbox" is empty, I hit sites like reddit and HN. I just skim the front page and find some stuff to entertain me. Then, I move on. I do something similar with Facebook feeds, although I sometimes miss feed items from my best friends when I want to see EVERYTHING (or at least all their shares and comments; stuff they want replies to). We need a way for casual-reading style feeds to be integrated with our "must read" feeds.
I think it's important to consider Fred's clarification in the comments section: "when i say "feeds" I don't really mean RSS/google reader/blogines/netvibes they are part of what i am talking about, but just a part of it the facebook news feed is the biggest thing out there today in terms of aggregating info you'll likely care about and that's a very mainstream service. twitter and the smart aggregators like techmeme and hacker news are also a big part of what i am talking about and they are also easier to consume than RSS for the mainstream user. i am sorry i wasn't more clear about that in my post."
So I think Fred's point is simply that there is a trend towards using feeds for finding relevant stuff on the web over search. And that there might be monetization opportunities latching onto that trend.