Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Feed aggregators

I'm a bit sick of hearing applications call themselves "feed aggregators" when they simple show me a chronological sequence of unrelated articles.

Sure, I guess that 4 or 5 years ago that was enough and worthy of the word, but in between I jumped from 20 or 30 to 354 feeds (I usually prune to 250 each 6 months).

I think its time to move up the goal post: you cannot call yourself a aggregator without actually doing it - finding relations between articles and presenting them in useful ways.

Let me give you some examples.

You follow feeds A, B and C. If article X from feed A is referenced by article Y in B and Z in C, at the very least I should have a "See also" section while seeing X on my feed reader. A link back inside the feed reader, from Y and Z back to X wouldn't also be out of the question.

And it makes sense to place Y and Z right next to X. I would first read X, and then the next one would be Y and Z in some order (a graph-theory-lover would expect that all articles in your feed reader should be read in a breadth-first order, actually.)

Also, feed reader companies seem interested on getting from you your activity stream. Such valued commodity is taken from you (with your consent in most cases) without giving nothing in return. They don't allow me to say "I like this article" so that I can influence a Baysean classification system. Sure, because I do expect the feed reader to suggest to me what are the articles I will like the most after some time.

This are just some ideas. I bet you'll be start to seeing them of them in the future, but with a magical new name. Marketing people like to create new names for features that should be part of the natural evolution of products.

In the meantime, if you have a feed reader that runs on Mac OS X, and that I can use on several Macs, please leave a comment.