

 Google Reader reader? Would you find this service useful? - pclark
http://box.plc.vc/gr/

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mattlanger
What I've been realizing more and more lately is how much I would appreciate a
reader without any concept of an unread item count.

I assume this feature made its way into the genre as a legacy from the
traditional email clients that seem to have inspired most feed readers, but
while an unread count has a place in email (albeit a complicated one, cf.
Inbox Zero) it seems utterly bizarre in the world of RSS. And for two reasons.

First, it's just stressful. It represents yet another item on this long list
of things I haven't accomplished (and probably _can't_ accomplish), a list
that only grows longer as I come across more sources of information on the
internet, subscribe to more feeds, follow more Twitter accounts, etc.

And second, as an offline analog, I've never walked into a library or a
bookstore or a newsstand and been given a list of books or periodicals I've
not yet read. Similarly, when my newspapers pile up in the recycling bin they
don't proffer me with a running tally of all the articles I skipped. While I
understand this is a feature that an RSS reader can offer that these examples
cannot, it still seems to me to be a stifling and oppressive thing whose
benefit doesn't nearly outweigh the stress it adds to my life.

At the end of the day _it's ok to miss something._ As Dave Winer said, "if
it's important it will come back around again; if not, well no one can know
everything."

(related/full disclosure: I'm actually hard at work on my own RSS reader
intended to address this and other issues, which explains why I've been
thinking so much about this stuff.)

~~~
mrbird
Agreed. What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the
current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

You could try to improve this with ML or stasticial models, but I don't even
think you'd have to get that sophisticated to make a big improvement.

~~~
jokermatt999
> What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the
> current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

Google Reader's "Sort by magic" attempts to do this. It'd be nice to have more
information on how it works though.

Also, don't underestimate the power of tagging your RSS feeds. Just like
people set up GMail/Outlook/etc labels for important people or emails, you can
set up tags for important feeds that you don't want to miss. Why not tag all
of the "must read" feeds, the "skim" feeds, and the "eh" feeds, so that you
can click on the "eh" label, and mark all as read if you get behind?

Google Reader is already a pretty powerful tool for feed reading (especially
in conjunction with Yahoo Pipes or similar), and a lot of issues with RSS can
already be solved with the tools at hand.

~~~
mattlanger
Tagging! If only! That's one of the features I've long wanted, a one-to-many
relationship between feeds and categories, as opposed to the inverse we get
with folders. What if I want to categorize something as "must read" in
addition to "technology"? What you describe here is a useful trick, but it
means I'm stuck labeling my feeds in a manner directly related to my need to
be able to mark-as-read.

~~~
jokermatt999
Ahh, I forgot that tagging is item by item, but feeds are folder by folder
only. My apologies. I'll go make a feature request for it. It seems odd that
they wouldn't already have this.

~~~
bdarnell
Google Reader's folders do allow for tag-like multiple categorization. If you
use drag and drop then it acts like folders (and removes the feed from its
previous location), but if you use the "Feed settings" dropdown in the blue
bar you can check multiple folders and the feed will appear in all of them.

You can also turn off display of unread counts with the menu under the little
downward triangle in the left column. These features are pretty
undiscoverable, but they're there.

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conesus
My solution to this problem is a bit more centered on the reader. NewsBlur, as
some of you may know, is a feed reader that shows you the original site and
marks off what you have read as you read it.

Since this Google Reader reader would track you as you move between sites (and
has a heuristic for determining which story you're hovering over or scrolling
past), you would not have the read counts in front of you.

My typical feed reading experience is bounce between the few sites that have
updated content. I use RSS because it means I don't have to hit the site as
frequently, and only when it has new content. If this had a way of both
showing the unread counts of all feeds as well as allowing you to read the
original site, I think it would be the solution to the problem that RSS
readers originally solved.

This is just an idea for the service. I developed something very similar, but
you can't go to the original site and still get stories marked as read as you
read them. But I moved to RSS to get to those counts of all of my feeds in the
first place. The loss of context (the site's styling and design) was a big
negative to RSS, but the loss of inline counts would be harder to swallow.

Keep the left side of Google Reader, but replace the much larger right side.

And if anybody is interested, the similar idea that I'm working on is at:
<http://www.newsblur.com>.

My implementation of the solution to the feed reading problem is very, very
similar, but those unread counts, man, are the reason I even use RSS. And
having to jump between tabs (Google Reader -> Original Site), would separate
me from those counts.

~~~
pclark
we felt that services like the one we propose works nicer than asking users to
change their daily routine, added benefit is that this would proliferate down
the entire google reader stack. eg: value if you just use google reader on
iphone.

~~~
conesus
Yeah, no doubt it's a lot easier to stay on the Google Reader stack. With
NewsBlur, it's completely separate from Google Reader (other than an initial
Google Reader OAuth import of your feeds). Which means I have to write my own
iPhone app to communicate with NewsBlur, but that's part of the fun.

It's not a business, just a side project where I learn as much as I can about
a huge variety of topics from server maintenance, to pattern recognition, to
distributed systems (feed fetching).

~~~
amackera
I wasn't aware of this project! I may indeed switch from GReader to Newsblur,
since it seems to be more in line with my habits.

I guess Newsblur and the subject of this topic solve different problems.

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statictype
Yes, this would be a useful service. When some item becomes really popular it
gets linked to from multiple sources in my feeds and I've already seen it
because it got linked to on Hacker News or twitter.

Bonus points for marking feed items as read if its only content is a link to a
page I've already seen.

~~~
aspiringsensei
Also, adding links to other blog posts responding/reacting to posts in what
I'm reading.

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badgergravling
It's not a million miles from my preferred solution to a similar problem. I
tend to exist in RSS, so wouldn't remove much by syncing with the rest of the
web. But what would really help is a way to check for duplication between my
subscriptions, and the people I follow who share the same article. I often see
3 or 4 of the same article appearing in my feeds, which is really annoying, as
well as wasting time...

~~~
tdoggette
I get my content from a lot of RSS feeds, plus HN, plus Rediit, plus all the
other miscellaneous places one finds links.

It'd be neat if there was a way to detect when a piece of content was just a
reblog of some picture or article or link that's doing the rounds: maybe if
the content is only a link plus less than a hundred words?

~~~
suppressingfire
Right, and then bring together all those related posts, so I have the links to
both the reddit comments and the HN comments in the same context as the
original article link.

~~~
tdoggette
I have about 15 pages of legal pad scribblings along this line.

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Entlin
Here's my take on this:

We will never be able to read everything. The question is: will I spend my
time allotted for newsreading by reading the most important things, or will I
randomly read important and unimportant things. The real problem is the lack
of importance information in the RSS protocol. As a feed creator, no matter
how many items I publish each day, people will be unhappy - some want more,
some less.

Somebody has to choose which news elements are more important than other
elments in a feed. And the only entity to do that is a human. We can outsource
it to all users (like Google Reader does with its "like" button and the
"magic" view, but this only works for very popular feeds in practice). We
could let a third party do it (basically an editor. This makes for complicated
3-way protocol, plus this editor probably wants to get paid). Or we could ask
the feed creator to give each item an importance value (1-100 or so). The feed
creator is in a unique position: he already invested some time writing the
entry (so adding a number isn't a lot of additional effort), plus he already
has a certain point of view visible in his writing, so adding importance
information wouldn't add a lot of surprises.

RSS readers can then work with that additional metadata in different ways:
show a cutoff slider (between 1-100), or prompt the user how many minutes he
intends to spend reading and compiling a good selection of all sources.

Options: average the numbers of each feed to catch those that try to gamble
the system cut their numbers down.

Suggestions, feedback welcome.

~~~
cheesey
How about having an RSS reader that displays a random selection of headlines
(or just the latest, depending on how full your inbox is), but it only lets
you read 10 of them. You can click those 10 links, but after that the rest are
greyed out until the next day.

Why? Putting a limit on how many articles you read will mean you don't feel
any pressure to read more. It'll also mean that you'll make sure to spend your
time reading things that are interesting to you. Your daily selection of 10
articles could be used by a stumbleupon-type learning algorithm (I know
NOTHING about these, by the way).

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seltzered
honestly, There are some feeds that I wish I could leave always as "mark all
as read" - i.e. nyt front page feed, seeking alpha rss, etc.

I recently instead made a personal rule to just use google reader for blogs
that don't post heavily, usually ones curated by a single person.

~~~
Sukotto
Having too many feeds is just like having too much physical stuff in your
life. I went through my list and paired it down to 100 (from about 300).

That's still too many and I plan to cut it down even more... but it's a weight
off my mind to just let all of them go.

A good place to start when pruning your feeds is the "trends" page.
<http://www.google.com/reader/view/#trends-page>

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norswap
Not useful, marking something as read in google reader is as simple as hitting
"next". Pressing a key when I'm reading a page or when I'm reading my feeds
isn't very different. And you must remember to do it when you read the page.

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AmitinLA
Semi OT: Most of my browsing time is in Reader, and I got initially excited
about this post since I thought what this was doing was something similar to
Fever (<http://feedafever.com/>), but maybe more powerful.

What I really am looking for is a way to manage my Reader feeds so that links
to similar sources (or similar stories) either get grouped or prioritized
based on the number of shares a la Techmeme.

Here's the use case. When Google shut down Wave or when the EFF did their
analysis of the Google/Verizon deal I had at least 20 feeds linking to the
same story, which I didn't really need. I should be able to exclude my Tier 1
feeds so they don't get caught up in these rules (i.e., if Gruber talks about
it I want to see it, no matter what). The rest of these stories get buried in
a Folder similar to the Gmail spam folder (or label, more accurately); I don't
see their unread count but they're there if I suspect I'm missing something.

Plus maybe a bonus option to exclude any stories based on productivity or
8-bit cupcakes.

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alcidesfonseca
My solution is a bit plainer and simpler: I read the feeds (and email) before
I surf the web. So your problem doesn't arise.

This has much to with your habits. I usually first open Email, Feeds, Twitter
and FB and open in new tabs the articles I am interested in. Then if by any
chance the ones I find out via twitter or IM, I've already read them before, I
don't have to re-read them.

~~~
wccrawford
I take it a step further. I use the feeds TO read the web. If I find another
site I like, I add its feed to my list. HN is about the only thing I visit
that isn't one of my feeds, and that's because it's a ranking service and not
just a linear blog.

------
Encosia
Probably, yes. It would need to be fully browser-based though. I wouldn't be
okay with shipping all of my viewing history to you for it to work.

It would be most useful if it could integrate with my Instapaper workflow. If
I visit a page and then hit "read later", that shouldn't be marked read in
Google Reader until I've archived or deleted it in Instapaper. Similarly, it
would be great if marking something read in Google Reader would archive any
matching items in my Instapaper account (this might be way beyond the scope of
what you're talking about though).

I would be okay with sharing my Instapaper username/password to make that
integration work.

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Janteh
I've been looking for something like this. Often I read posts through either
HN or someone's Twitter, while I'm also subscribed to the RSS feed. To have
them automatically marked as read would be awesome.

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jpalomaki
I think it would be useful to have a service that would provide an IMAP style
API for others to consume. This service would manage my subscriptions and
maintain information about read/unread status, starred items and so on.

The benefit would be that I could easily use different reader
applications/services, for example depending on the device I'm using or other
needs. This would also make trying out new things, such as the Newsblur much
more convenient.

~~~
pclark
Google Reader is pretty much this - has an API

~~~
EastSmith
Are you using the unofficial API (pyrfeed) or Google Ajax feed API?I've played
with both last year and first one was broken, second one had limited
commercial usage.

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carson
Maybe I'm not typical but I don't see dups from other channels that are also
in reader all that often so I'm not sure I would find this service very
useful. I don't think it solves the stated problem of missing interesting
articles either, that makes an assumption that you would see _all_ the
important articles outside of reader and if that was the case you should just
stop using reader.

~~~
pclark
if you're a user with, say, 20 feeds, in google reader - we think its valuable
being able to match those feeds to what you've read externally. As with that
amount of feeds the daily amount of articles is manageable, so its all about
pruning it to keep the redundant stuff out.

------
mrbird
Another feature I think would be really cool in a tool like this is that it
could auto-discover which feeds you read often, even if you haven't subscribed
to them. If it detects that you visit blog X often (either deliberately or
from being redirected, tweets, etc.), it could recommend that you subscribe.

------
barmstrong
Marking items you already read would only get rid of about 10% at most of
Google Reader's unread count.

This is why I like the Hacker News format of up voting.

Killer app: hacker news style up-voting across any news topic (aka...reddit?)

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pragmatic
1) Yes this is useful.

2) Why can't Google do this? They have my search/navigation history and my
feeds.

3) I was kinda hoping this provided an aggregated RSS feed of my Google
reader. Why? Because I have other devices that accept RSS feeds but I don't
want to export OPML and then have 2 separate feeds to keep in sync.

------
ronnoch
I switched from Google Reader to Friendfeed about two months ago. So far, it's
a much better fit for me. It looks and feels like Twitter but you can add RSS
feeds (using the "imaginary friends" feature). Like Twitter, there's no
"unread items" counter, if you skip something it just drops off the page.

------
rlorenzo
Does this help with buzz updates? It bothers me that if I read buzz updates in
gmail that they are still unread in google reader's "friends you follow" and
vice versa.

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carusen
They should make it available also for mobile browsers. I read a lot on my
trusty Android while on trains/subways/taxis/etc.

------
rrhyne
Useful very. Pay for it? No. Hope this helps.

------
tleite
Have you heard of feedly.com ?

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confuzatron
I don't think this would make a huge difference to me, as I don't subscribe to
enough feeds in GR for it to make a big difference to how I'd use it.

Also, speaking of unread flags [grating record scratch sound] I wrote a Chrome
extension to add unread flags to HN comments:
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/imeeonmdbakdmiln...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/imeeonmdbakdmilnnccaddiplgjjhbog?hl=en-
gb)

Ugh, that was awkward. Sorry about that.

