rss

I’m sure somebody has to have bitched about this before, it has to be a common complaint.

I recently switched from using Bloglines to using Google Reader as my primary RSS/Atom feed reader. Great move. I love Google Reader. In my opinion, its the best online feed reader on the market. Seamless integration with my GMail, only marks posts I actually read as read, etc. Its a bit slow sometimes, but hell, so was Bloglines. I can live with it.

But the real problem with feed readers, and blogs in general, is social. People need to stop the “me too” posts. I’m sick of it. I subscribe to most of the big guys. Boing Boing. TechCrunch. Slashdot. Digg. Deli.icio.us. And tons of little guys. And about 20% of the content they post is the same damn stuff everybody else has posted. If one more person today posts anything about:

• Microsoft paying for people to edit Wikipedia
• Second Life (anything about Second Life. I’m sick of the whole concept)
• MySpace’s spam lawsuit

… I’m going to freaking kill somebody.

For me, the ultimate killer feed reader wouldn’t be yet another feed aggregator, it would be a meme aggregator, an agent to identify trends of similar posts and eliminate them so I only get the most relevent posts, not the same news story over and over. And while you’re at it, track the posts I actually spend time reading and don’t just scroll over, and use that data to figure out what topics I actually care about, so I don’t get carpal tunnel of the scroll wheel finger skipping posts I don’t care about.