Well, what I find depressing about RSS is that it's been around for 10+ years and there's been no real innovation.
There are two user interfaces seen in RSS readers: (i) show headlines from multiple blogs in their own little windows, (ii) show headlines from all blogs in one big mess.
It's always seemed possible that you could have a better user interface, or that machine learning could be used to pick out stuff you're actually interested in -- but no, it's never happened. Every so often some organization would come out with a new RSS reader and it was always the same boring stuff.
(In fact, Andraz and the guys at Zemanta have a lot of experience with content analysis and they can't even find anything interesting to say about this subject... That's the point, nobody's even trying to make a better RSS reader)
Now, to be fair, most of the alternatives aren't much better. Twitter makes no attempt to be discriminative (and with the short stimulus, filtering Twitter might be tough.) Facebook seems to have some sense of priority over what it shows you, but it doesn't give you a lot of control.
What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to pay for something that makes the web easier to follow?
> What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to pay for something that makes the web easier to follow?
There are already a number of these: different planet* aggregators for technologies, longreads for "longer pieces", etc...
A single aggregator? The world does not need it, because it's absolutely worthless and makes little to no sense. I probably don't want to read what you want to, and neither does the next guy.
> If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription
There's a reason why newspaper are dying: by and large, people are not going to pay for a newspaper subscription.
I definitely agree that personalization is the key - but on an individual basis.
That is the focus of our company - and why we feel RSS won't die - but its role will evolve as more info is consumed via Twitter/ etc/ etc - ignoring the social signs(data) readers/ users provide doesn't make much sense.
But personalization should always be an option - because the firehose is still very useful
UI #2 works for me: one big list of things I probably want to read. If your feed reader looks like "one big mess", maybe you should unsubscribe from some of the noisier feeds before reaching for machine learning.
Alternatively, use folders. Have a "quiet" folder with all the slow feeds you follow closely, and a "noisy" folder for all the feeds you just skim.
FriendFeed was/is an innovation in RSS reading. It has a real-time web interface and uses your friends to surface interesting material. It has smart handling of Media RSS and geoRSS.
Comments
Well, what I find depressing about RSS is that it's been around for 10+ years and there's been no real innovation.
There are two user interfaces seen in RSS readers: (i) show headlines from multiple blogs in their own little windows, (ii) show headlines from all blogs in one big mess.
It's always seemed possible that you could have a better user interface, or that machine learning could be used to pick out stuff you're actually interested in -- but no, it's never happened. Every so often some organization would come out with a new RSS reader and it was always the same boring stuff.
(In fact, Andraz and the guys at Zemanta have a lot of experience with content analysis and they can't even find anything interesting to say about this subject... That's the point, nobody's even trying to make a better RSS reader)
Now, to be fair, most of the alternatives aren't much better. Twitter makes no attempt to be discriminative (and with the short stimulus, filtering Twitter might be tough.) Facebook seems to have some sense of priority over what it shows you, but it doesn't give you a lot of control.
What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to pay for something that makes the web easier to follow?
> What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to pay for something that makes the web easier to follow?
There are already a number of these: different planet* aggregators for technologies, longreads for "longer pieces", etc...
A single aggregator? The world does not need it, because it's absolutely worthless and makes little to no sense. I probably don't want to read what you want to, and neither does the next guy.
> If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription
There's a reason why newspaper are dying: by and large, people are not going to pay for a newspaper subscription.
I definitely agree that personalization is the key - but on an individual basis.
That is the focus of our company - and why we feel RSS won't die - but its role will evolve as more info is consumed via Twitter/ etc/ etc - ignoring the social signs(data) readers/ users provide doesn't make much sense.
But personalization should always be an option - because the firehose is still very useful
UI #2 works for me: one big list of things I probably want to read. If your feed reader looks like "one big mess", maybe you should unsubscribe from some of the noisier feeds before reaching for machine learning.
Alternatively, use folders. Have a "quiet" folder with all the slow feeds you follow closely, and a "noisy" folder for all the feeds you just skim.
FriendFeed was/is an innovation in RSS reading. It has a real-time web interface and uses your friends to surface interesting material. It has smart handling of Media RSS and geoRSS.
What about Flipboard or Pulse on iPad? And Flipboard does have existing curated topic feeds, for free even.
Google Currents also has a tab for your Google Reader feeds.
We were trying to address some problems with consuming information when oversubscribing to RSS feeds in Smart Reader. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895662