Tech Goes Boom

About Newsfire and Feed Readers in General

So there's a new newsreader on the block, Newsfire. Lots of people are raving about how awesome it is. I would like to give you an in-depth review of it, but shortly after launching, it promptly barfs all over itself and crashes. This may be because I'm using it through a firewall, but I'm not sure. But I can give you a couple of initial impressions from what I was able to figure out.

No grouping of feeds: Damnit people, this is a tried and true feature that is necessary for anyone with more than a couple of feeds. If you want to cook up a nice little metadata system (like id3 for feeds) so we can do some nice dynamic grouping, in a smart group ala iTunes, knock yourself out. But to not offer any grouping capabilities is just lame. I'm reading something like 300 feeds now. I want to sort. I don't necessarily care to have the most recently updated feeds float to the top. Sure it's pretty but not that useful.

Two Pane Interface: This is interesting, but I would have to see it in practice some more to see if it's more useful than something like NetNewsWire. As someone pointed out, the forward and backward buttons don't go to the next unread article. That's a bummer.

If you're looking for a killer feature for an RSS reader, I'll hook you up. Threading. Like gmail handles mailing lists, group related blog entries from various blogs so I don't have to see 40 entries about some piece of news I don't care about. Let me mark them all as read and move on. While a good search capability would mimic this, I'd like to have it automatically appended to each entry with links like "highlight items like this" or "mark items like this read". It would be a list of all articles that match, in chronologic order.

Or you can do this like mail on Mac OS X does by putting an arrow next to the article title so you can expand or contract the list, and a number next to the title indicating how many related articles there are. It would be kind of nice to sort articles by how many related articles exist for it. You could even have a view much like Google News which will display feeds in order of importance as evaluated by how related they are. Say you have one blog post that gets a lot of attention and is linked to by 30 other bloggers. That post would be the headline, and underneath the list of all entries that link back to it.

With the volume of data that is out there, people need useful ways of consuming that data. The current spate of feedreaders out there, at least on the mac offer little flexibility on how to tackle huge numbers of articles makinging you deal with them one by one, with little information on whether or not you might care. There are ways of dealing with this however. There's lots of interesting metadata out there for making the situation better.

Say I really like articles from Zeldman's feed. Chances are, I'm going to like sites that he links to that include feeds. If I give Zeldman a rank of 5 in importance, associate a couple importance points to domains he links to that include feeds, like A List Apart. While we're at it, if I'm not subscribed to a linked site from someone with high importance, offer to let me grab its feeds. As I said earlier, importance can also be assigned by how linked to an article is. Importance can be expressed in a number of visual ways, like say blue titles for low importance, and red titles for high importance. You could also assign importance by how often the feed is updated (and incidentally schedule the reader to adjust its update frequency for this feed as a result). Parse out the article bodies for keywords, and make note of fact I read a lot of articles about neuroscience, assign these higher importance. On each article, let me rank it and learn from it like a spam filter.

As far as I can tell, Newsfire relies on only one importance factor, which is number of unread articles. This is a marginal importance value at best. I'm far more interested in feeds that consistently offer worthwhile things to read once a day than feeds that pump out crap 20 times a day.

A good importance ranking system would also help me decide which feeds I want to drop off the list. If a feed hasn't been updated in a month, pop up a dialog stating so and offer to unsubscribe. If a feed's importance ranking falls below a certain threshold make the same offer.

Obviously there are some special feeds you would want to exempt from this scheme, like a FedEx tracking feed, or your netflix shipping feed. So some gross categorization is still required even if it's just something like: work your magic on these feeds, but just display these feeds as they come. Or you could just offer a dial for the magic that goes from "leave feeds alone" to "I trust you to display these things in a way that's important"

Syndication is already becoming a major player on the internet scene, and one thing vital to its continued growth are feedreaders that make very large numbers of feeds manageable for someone who doesn't have all day to read them and sort the wheat from the chaff. This will be the next leap for feedreaders, and will take them from something that we get by with to something that is really useful.