

The "Feedization" Of The Web - langer
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/09/the-feedization.html

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snprbob86
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.

~~~
rrf
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.

