Danny Ayers points out today that in a world of ubiquitous computing, we are liable to drown in RSS feeds for RFID sensors, GPS tracking devices and goodness knows what else. I know I see things every day that I'd like to slap a tiny sensor on and track by feeds! This is liable to be an increasingly serious problem, though, and feed overload could for all intents and purposes break the medium of RSS altogether.
My favorite suggestions so far on how to deal:
- Nicole Simon of Bloxpert, in a hard-hitting interview with Bloglines' Mark Fletcher last month, asked why feeds couldn't be subscribed to on a perishable basis. After a short period of time subscribers would be asked if they wish to remain subscribed to the feed - otherwise it would be deleted. I love that idea.
- Ben Casnocha writes from the "get over it" camp of dealing with overload - subscribe freely to lots of feeds, skim quickly and find an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.
- I've found that hierarchies of priority are useful. I put my feeds in folders by theme, put the ones that have infrequent and important updates (like search for inbound links to my site) in their own folders and then use Peter Brown's immedi.at to subscribe to IM notifications of updates to the super-important and time sensitive feeds.
I can only imagine, given the ingenuity of Nicole Simon's feature request, that there must be other great ideas lurking out there in readers' brains. I found the major feed reader vendors to be pretty responsive to customer feedback. Anyone care to share?
1. The reader I use (Google.com/ig) shows only the headlines. I scan through the headlines to try and find something that looks interesting, and then check it out. I wonder what percentage of RSS reader users do the same. One idea I thought of was to have a way to be notified if a feed headline or except contains a specific keyword or phrase (like Technorati, but only for the feeds I am subscribed to). The only drawback is that there is probably always something that I will be interested in reading that does not contain any keywords I would use, and that is where blogs like Digg and BoingBoing come in. Back to the keyword filter idea, I imagine it would be useful, but wouldn't know until I tried it. Does anyone know if there is such a service? Does immedi.at have this feature?
Posted at 3:18PM on Feb 6th 2006 by Nick D