techno.blog("Dion")

Here we have some thoughts on what we want in an RSS tool.

I think people run through the following evolution as they work with RSS feeds (and it gets worse as time goes on, as more and more interesting feeds come out):

1. News: I want to read my various sites in a different fashion (subscribe to the BBC, CNN, etc)
2. Buddy: I want to read what my buddies are saying
3. Groups: I keep finding groups of people talking topics that I am interested in, so I keep adding people to my watch lists
4. Holy cow, I have 125 feeds, and hence get hundreds of entries to plow through on a daily basis. How can I deal with this?

It is a tough problem. We JUST went through this with the web itself. As more sites entered the ether, it became harder and harder to find what we really wanted, and to filter that information. When blogs came about we were watching early adopters and could follow the trend setters. Now everyone and their mother has a blog.

It will be interesting to see the new tools that come out to help us. More metadata, better searching, more intelligent filtering, etc. If they solve it for RSS, they will solve it for many other things.

I am still happy using NewGator and getting feeds filtered into my email, but as my feed list grows, it becomes more and more unmanageable!