Saturday, August 28, 2004

What's wrong with feed readers?

Another interesting rant, this one on lack of innovation in feed readers. At one point, Ponyboy writes:
    Feed readers have at their disposal near infinite processing power, well-differentiated and -defined data and… do nothing with them. You can sort your feed items by date. Exciting!

    Where are the extrapolations, based on the data? Where is Bayesian filtering? Why isn’t there auto-correlation between like items? Why isn’t there sorting by link popularity? Or inter-linking between feeds? Why can’t I rank feeds or categories higher than others? Why can’t I rate items and let the cumulative ratings over time determine feed rankings? Why isn’t there some statistical combination of each of the above to put what I’m actually going to care about at the top of the list and the discussions about which syndication protocol is best at the bottom?
I couldn't agree more. And here is what you're looking for, Ponyboy.

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