RSS aggregator idiot

August 24, 2005 12:00 PM

Can you help a guy out getting started on using RSS feeds?

I've been looking today at options for RSS aggregators, and I'm either missing some way of configuring them, or I'm missing the point. Taking the Sage Firefox extension, or bloglines, as an example (although I've played with a couple of standalone java apps as well) they seem to have a fairly common interface: some tree on the left side where one can see that there are, say, 4 new MeFi FPP's, then click on the MeFi tree item to see them. Is that as good as it gets? i.e. is the only possible advantage over simply clicking through my bookmarks the fact that I see beforehand whether there are new items or not?

What I suppose I'm hoping for is something that will make some intelligent guesses (whether Bayesian or simply keyword driven) about which items I'm likely to be interested in and put them in a list for me over on the right side -- so that I have in front of me a list of what the reader thinks I'll be most interested in: these two from MefI, this one from BoingBoing, and so on. Am I just an idiot who needs to look more closely at the configuration options?

posted by tyllwin to Computers & Internet (18 answers total)

The main advantage is that items from feeds you're interested in are delivered to your central repository, rather than you having to go in the endless circle of looking for new site content. The news comes to you.

In terms of intelligent customization: that's not really the responsibility of RSS. You might look into systems like del.icio.us or Digg to get "intelligent" content. I'm pretty sure Bloglines doesn't have anything like this built in.

Also, see: Topix.net.

The trick with feeds is to find the ones that originate a lot of content (rather than regurgitate it) and are regularly interesting to you.

(correct me if I'm wrong, here)
posted by selfnoise at 12:08 PM on August 24, 2005

Yeah, the power comes in the fact that you can easily put 50 or 100 feeds in one simple interface. They will update automatically on their own without you having to do anything, and you can very quickly scan the titles and/or bodies without loading any web pages. Overall if you're just using it to keep track of a couple of feeds you probably won't gain anything compared to using the web site.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:13 PM on August 24, 2005

For what it's worth, I've found that almost every RSS aggregator misses the point entirely, and makes the feed-skimming process too involved to be useful. I don't bother with RSS on my Windows machine, since the RSS aggregator interfaces are, without exception, bloated and inefficient (including bloglines).

On my Mac, there's a fantastic little program called Newsfire. Until I used it, I had no idea why RSS was so great. Now I get it, but only when I'm using Newsfire: the program is clean, simple, and elegant, and it allows me to skim items of interest much (much, much) faster than clicking through my bookmarks or using an RSS reader that uses the email client (e.g., Outlook) metaphor.

An image.
posted by socratic at 12:17 PM on August 24, 2005

(Newsfire doesn't have the recommendations feature you want, btw. As to that feature, the closest thing I can think of is the "You might be interested in" feature of Bloglines. That and keeping meta-feeds like Waxy and Boingboing in my list.)
posted by socratic at 12:19 PM on August 24, 2005

The Bloglines "might be interested" thing only worked if you regularly looked at other people's feedrolls. Or at least that's how it used to be. Haven't looked at it in a while.

I don't use Bloglines to skim a lot of data: just to keep the websites I read within easy reach. I imagine if you were trying to wade hip-deep through Al Gore's superhighway you'd probably want something more fully-featured.
posted by selfnoise at 12:27 PM on August 24, 2005

Sorry to add to the buzzkill, but Rhomboid is right...the advantage is that the tool monitors a lot of stuff for you. The other scenario where RSS kicks butt is when a piece of content updates infrequently and at no predetermined schedule. That content had be better damn good (or you are a masochist) to keep checking for it all the time and get no payoff. With RSS however, you can file that nugget away and be pleasantly surprised when something new pops up.
posted by mmascolino at 12:31 PM on August 24, 2005

The problem with RSS clients is that, almost without exception, they use an overloaded email metaphor (see above) or they exist as sort of super-bookmarks (Sage). Very few of the clients do a stellar job of a) feed monitoring, b) notification, and c) aggregation. It sounds simple enough, but it's awfully hard to make a process that is efficient enough to make bookmark-clicking obsolete (which is one of the things RSS should be good for).
posted by socratic at 12:39 PM on August 24, 2005

Aggregator author here. How would I go about avoiding the "overloaded email metaphor"?
posted by cillit bang at 12:51 PM on August 24, 2005

AmphetaRate tries to do what you want in terms of recommendations. It provides a customized RSS feed for you which changes based on how you rate the items that show up there.

But yeah, the main point of RSS is to know what's new, which is huge for me. I wouldn't use an email client that didn't differentiate between read and unread messages. Oops, did I just use some sort of overloaded metaphor?
posted by revgeorge at 1:07 PM on August 24, 2005

In Bloglines, when you do a search in the directory, you are given an option to subscribe to that search. Hasn't done much for me, but you might dig it, depending on the S/N ratio of your keyword(s).
posted by 31d1 at 2:47 PM on August 24, 2005

Findory claims to do the type of Bayesian learning you're talking about--clicking on an article trains it to give you more of that type of article--but the last time I played with it, it had a pretty clumsy interface for adding feeds, which makes it kinda useless for keeping track of infrequently updated blogs (which is what I love Bloglines for). Combining the two would be kind of cool, but I expect the math and the interface would both get hella complicated in terms of the software knowing which infrequently updated feed items are always high priority.
posted by arto at 3:05 PM on August 24, 2005

cillit bang - Simplify. I hate to 'jack, but my problem with most RSS aggregators is that they're too full-featured. Great pieces of software (FeedDemon is made by one guy, I think, and it's a great piece of work), but too much. The programs that emulate Microsoft Outlook do too many things. Outlook is an information management tool, meant to collect incoming messages and allow them to be reviewed and manipulated at any time in the future. Outlook is also intended to accomplish a whole raft of disparate tasks: time scheduling, task planning, email, contact management, and the interrelationships between them.

RSS aggregators, in my (not so humble, heh) opinion, don't need to be such complex tools. Look at FeedDemon (hell, you might be the author, for all I know): the text is small, there are buttons everywhere, there are drop-lists and menus and icons and toolbars and probably hundreds of features, most of which are overkill.

My ideal feedreader would be something like Newsfire, with large text, lots of drag and drop, and low overhead, but with a plugin architecture so that people who need specialist features could add them in with little difficulty. Why start simple? Because, for me (and, apparently, a large chunk of the market; I think there was a report on /. the other day about RSS not gaining widespread market acceptance) the main goal is having a way to tell if there is new content that is faster and simpler than clicking through my bookmarks. That includes total number of clicks to accomplish a task; memory footprint; interface simplicity; speed; all variations on the theme of efficiency.

(By the way, I'm not talking completely out of my ass. I am a former programmer, and I've written large, complex applications and struggled with small ones, so I'm not being flippant about this. Which aggregator do you write?)
posted by socratic at 3:49 PM on August 24, 2005

So what's wrong with Bloglines, looking at it from that angle? It seems fairly efficient to me.
posted by selfnoise at 4:22 PM on August 24, 2005

Bloglines gets a B+ from me. Other than Newsfire, I've used Bloglines the most (I'm fiddling with Feedlounge as well). It's good, but it's not as exceptionally good as Newsfire (and, since I have my laptop with me everywhere, the portability of Bloglines - a huge selling point - isn't a deal-maker for me).
posted by socratic at 4:35 PM on August 24, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers.

Well, at least I no longer feel quite as dumb -- my short answer is that there really isn't anything exactly like what I'm describing, and that if I want any such thing I'd have to take on the daunting task of cobbling something together. Maybe there are enough open-source building blocks to make it possible, but that's a bit more than I want to bite off.

My personal problem, I guess, is that if there's no intelligence at all behind it, RSS feeds as a whole are useful to me only for infrequently changing pages -- sadly, the very ones least likely to have RSS feeds. For sites like MeFi or Slashdot -- where I already know that there are going to be 10 new FPP's a day, it's less work just to click the bookmark.
posted by tyllwin at 4:42 PM on August 24, 2005

Is this more what you're looking for? (Just a google search, but the first link looks like more of a general purpose website monitor.)
posted by socratic at 4:58 PM on August 24, 2005

Perhaps this Ultra Gleeper bears mentioning if you're felling hackerly.
posted by 31d1 at 8:33 PM on August 24, 2005

I use Bloglines all the time and I would say it was my main web experience now -- I even get tetchy when a website doesn't have some kind of active RSS. That said I wish there was a skinning option because the greys can be deadly dull.
posted by feelinglistless at 1:22 PM on August 25, 2005