RSS Readers-Why have you forsaken us? Part 2: That light isn’t a train

Earlier yesterday I wrote a post lamenting the state of RSS readers–RSS Readers–Why have you forsaken us? Part 1: Setting the stage–and I didn’t have a solid idea of how RSS readers could improve themselves. I couldn’t put my head around a better UI or workflow (besides one-click subscribe), then that afternoon I hit this piece of news–WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud–and some gears started turning. A few hunks of rust came off and the protestations of my brain being forced into gymnastics was audible across the room.

I read through a good number of posts:

• HowTo: River2 is a fresh start
  
• HowTo: Rebooting the RSS cloud
• How to publish and receive blog posts in Real-time
  
• RSS in the Clouds « Blog « WordPress.com

Then installed the RSS Cloud plugin, like Corvida–Installing WordPress RSSCloud Plugin | SheGeeks.net–I was amazed at the simplicity (you turn it on and you’re done) and played with Dave Winer’s River2 for a short bit (not quite the RSS reader I could get into, but that’s fine). This morning I caught up on the news and saw that LazyFeed was already supporting RSSCloud–LazyFeed: 1st Independent RSS Aggregator Declares Support for RSSCloud–which should put pressure on other RSS apps to do the same. The bigger question is: so what?

The so what is that RSS readers have been losing out because they were losing relevance compared to rapid fire, fire hose information streams like Twitter and Techmeme. Dear Lord you had to check the sources for updates and if you relied on Google Reader, those “updates” might not be so fresh or up-to-date! Now, what if …

You combined the persistence of a solid RSS reader with the immediacy of a dashboard or ticker? Have your gignormous list of feeds, but mark a select few as HUD feeds. Feeds that maybe could be pushed to Twitter or tapped into by Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Like your top 20 “I don’t want to miss a single thing” feeds, while in the background the “reader” part is building a relevancy-linked reading list. Find a way to consolidate articles on a topic, meme, headline, or concept into streams of articles. Sure be able to read your feeds like we do now (an interface like FeedDemon or NetNewsWire is good I think), but also have this information stream pulled together. Looking for the days posts on RSS or Facebook or social media or H1N1? Then they are already consolidated for you. Yes, you can build “smart folders”, but you have to know the topic first to do that. Sure you can have a folder with big concepts that you’re interested in, but when news breaks, wouldn’t it be good to have something like your own Techmeme based on the sources you follow?

I see the RSS Cloud giving info junkies like me and the casual news hound ways to grab data faster, in real time with potentially more metadata tied to the items (keywords, tags, categories) than we’ve had before. I also see that putting this all together isn’t going to be easy. More blogs have to support RSS Cloud and/or PubSubHubBub to have a critical mass of near-real time posts to work with, however that might not take as long as we think. If FriendFeed jumped on the bandwagon, well that would launch this data set into the digerati mainstream pretty darn fast.

That’s my idea and vision. I’d welcome the chance to work with someone like Nick or Brent or Greg on this kind of app. I think there is something there to get excited about. I think this is something we could all use. And I know it can be done.

Tagged as: information dashboards, rss reader 2.0, RSSCloud