Google Reader reader? Would you find this service useful? | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader reader? Would you find this service useful?

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99 pointspclark47 comments

What I've been realizing more and more lately is how much I would appreciate a reader without any concept of an unread item count.

I assume this feature made its way into the genre as a legacy from the traditional email clients that seem to have inspired most feed readers, but while an unread count has a place in email (albeit a complicated one, cf. Inbox Zero) it seems utterly bizarre in the world of RSS. And for two reasons.

First, it's just stressful. It represents yet another item on this long list of things I haven't accomplished (and probably can't accomplish), a list that only grows longer as I come across more sources of information on the internet, subscribe to more feeds, follow more Twitter accounts, etc.

And second, as an offline analog, I've never walked into a library or a bookstore or a newsstand and been given a list of books or periodicals I've not yet read. Similarly, when my newspapers pile up in the recycling bin they don't proffer me with a running tally of all the articles I skipped. While I understand this is a feature that an RSS reader can offer that these examples cannot, it still seems to me to be a stifling and oppressive thing whose benefit doesn't nearly outweigh the stress it adds to my life.

At the end of the day it's ok to miss something. As Dave Winer said, "if it's important it will come back around again; if not, well no one can know everything."

(related/full disclosure: I'm actually hard at work on my own RSS reader intended to address this and other issues, which explains why I've been thinking so much about this stuff.)

> At the end of the day it's ok to miss something. As Dave Winer said, "if it's important it will come back around again; if not, well no one can know everything."

You've inspired me to rethink my perspective of my RSS reader. Thanks.

Agreed. What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

You could try to improve this with ML or stasticial models, but I don't even think you'd have to get that sophisticated to make a big improvement.

That's actually something I thought on for a while, but never got the time to implement. Sort of an anti-Reddit; you add your RSS feeds, and then like or dislike various things you read. The software, using various ranking metrics, then begins to recognise the content in the RSS feeds, and displays what you consider more interesting more prominently (so it acts as the ranking algorithm without social input).

I don't think something like that would be hard to implement. Ranking metrics could be simple at first: whether a site is "preferred", whether content is agreed with or disagreed with (the software should display both prominently, otherwise it ends up as a circlejerk), and whether the content is interesting or disinteresting.

However, the big problem I saw with such a setup was that it de-socializes the web; while I get a custom news feed, I don't get the quality comments I generally find on aggregators like HN or Reddit (so long as it's a decent subreddit anyway). So, the next iteration could use a distributed database backend (like CouchDB) to allow comments to be shared cross-node; people share a small web presence on their site, and you can choose to follow their comments on articles, like some sort of distributed Twitter.

The self-defeating part of the exercise that got me was that at that point, you've basically made discovery difficult. Which you'd address with a central hub. At which point, why not just use HN/Reddit anyway?

> What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

Google Reader's "Sort by magic" attempts to do this. It'd be nice to have more information on how it works though.

Also, don't underestimate the power of tagging your RSS feeds. Just like people set up GMail/Outlook/etc labels for important people or emails, you can set up tags for important feeds that you don't want to miss. Why not tag all of the "must read" feeds, the "skim" feeds, and the "eh" feeds, so that you can click on the "eh" label, and mark all as read if you get behind?

Google Reader is already a pretty powerful tool for feed reading (especially in conjunction with Yahoo Pipes or similar), and a lot of issues with RSS can already be solved with the tools at hand.

Tagging! If only! That's one of the features I've long wanted, a one-to-many relationship between feeds and categories, as opposed to the inverse we get with folders. What if I want to categorize something as "must read" in addition to "technology"? What you describe here is a useful trick, but it means I'm stuck labeling my feeds in a manner directly related to my need to be able to mark-as-read.

Ahh, I forgot that tagging is item by item, but feeds are folder by folder only. My apologies. I'll go make a feature request for it. It seems odd that they wouldn't already have this.

Google Reader's folders do allow for tag-like multiple categorization. If you use drag and drop then it acts like folders (and removes the feed from its previous location), but if you use the "Feed settings" dropdown in the blue bar you can check multiple folders and the feed will appear in all of them.

You can also turn off display of unread counts with the menu under the little downward triangle in the left column. These features are pretty undiscoverable, but they're there.

I thought "Sort by Magic" was simply a means of floating posts from low-volume blogs to the top, so they don't get lost under a sea of Gawker.

Got definite plans for this in the pipeline, in addition to filtering out dupes.

My solution to this problem is a bit more centered on the reader. NewsBlur, as some of you may know, is a feed reader that shows you the original site and marks off what you have read as you read it.

Since this Google Reader reader would track you as you move between sites (and has a heuristic for determining which story you're hovering over or scrolling past), you would not have the read counts in front of you.

My typical feed reading experience is bounce between the few sites that have updated content. I use RSS because it means I don't have to hit the site as frequently, and only when it has new content. If this had a way of both showing the unread counts of all feeds as well as allowing you to read the original site, I think it would be the solution to the problem that RSS readers originally solved.

This is just an idea for the service. I developed something very similar, but you can't go to the original site and still get stories marked as read as you read them. But I moved to RSS to get to those counts of all of my feeds in the first place. The loss of context (the site's styling and design) was a big negative to RSS, but the loss of inline counts would be harder to swallow.

Keep the left side of Google Reader, but replace the much larger right side.

And if anybody is interested, the similar idea that I'm working on is at: http://www.newsblur.com.

My implementation of the solution to the feed reading problem is very, very similar, but those unread counts, man, are the reason I even use RSS. And having to jump between tabs (Google Reader -> Original Site), would separate me from those counts.

we felt that services like the one we propose works nicer than asking users to change their daily routine, added benefit is that this would proliferate down the entire google reader stack. eg: value if you just use google reader on iphone.

Yeah, no doubt it's a lot easier to stay on the Google Reader stack. With NewsBlur, it's completely separate from Google Reader (other than an initial Google Reader OAuth import of your feeds). Which means I have to write my own iPhone app to communicate with NewsBlur, but that's part of the fun.

It's not a business, just a side project where I learn as much as I can about a huge variety of topics from server maintenance, to pattern recognition, to distributed systems (feed fetching).

I wasn't aware of this project! I may indeed switch from GReader to Newsblur, since it seems to be more in line with my habits.

I guess Newsblur and the subject of this topic solve different problems.

Yes, this would be a useful service. When some item becomes really popular it gets linked to from multiple sources in my feeds and I've already seen it because it got linked to on Hacker News or twitter.

Bonus points for marking feed items as read if its only content is a link to a page I've already seen.

Also, adding links to other blog posts responding/reacting to posts in what I'm reading.

It's not a million miles from my preferred solution to a similar problem. I tend to exist in RSS, so wouldn't remove much by syncing with the rest of the web. But what would really help is a way to check for duplication between my subscriptions, and the people I follow who share the same article. I often see 3 or 4 of the same article appearing in my feeds, which is really annoying, as well as wasting time...

I get my content from a lot of RSS feeds, plus HN, plus Rediit, plus all the other miscellaneous places one finds links.

It'd be neat if there was a way to detect when a piece of content was just a reblog of some picture or article or link that's doing the rounds: maybe if the content is only a link plus less than a hundred words?

Right, and then bring together all those related posts, so I have the links to both the reddit comments and the HN comments in the same context as the original article link.

I have about 15 pages of legal pad scribblings along this line.

This is my biggest annoyance with my RSS feeds, I'd love to see this have a solution.

we could do that fairly easily, probably.

Here's my take on this:

We will never be able to read everything. The question is: will I spend my time allotted for newsreading by reading the most important things, or will I randomly read important and unimportant things. The real problem is the lack of importance information in the RSS protocol. As a feed creator, no matter how many items I publish each day, people will be unhappy - some want more, some less.

Somebody has to choose which news elements are more important than other elments in a feed. And the only entity to do that is a human. We can outsource it to all users (like Google Reader does with its "like" button and the "magic" view, but this only works for very popular feeds in practice). We could let a third party do it (basically an editor. This makes for complicated 3-way protocol, plus this editor probably wants to get paid). Or we could ask the feed creator to give each item an importance value (1-100 or so). The feed creator is in a unique position: he already invested some time writing the entry (so adding a number isn't a lot of additional effort), plus he already has a certain point of view visible in his writing, so adding importance information wouldn't add a lot of surprises.

RSS readers can then work with that additional metadata in different ways: show a cutoff slider (between 1-100), or prompt the user how many minutes he intends to spend reading and compiling a good selection of all sources.

Options: average the numbers of each feed to catch those that try to gamble the system cut their numbers down.

Suggestions, feedback welcome.

How about having an RSS reader that displays a random selection of headlines (or just the latest, depending on how full your inbox is), but it only lets you read 10 of them. You can click those 10 links, but after that the rest are greyed out until the next day.

Why? Putting a limit on how many articles you read will mean you don't feel any pressure to read more. It'll also mean that you'll make sure to spend your time reading things that are interesting to you. Your daily selection of 10 articles could be used by a stumbleupon-type learning algorithm (I know NOTHING about these, by the way).

honestly, There are some feeds that I wish I could leave always as "mark all as read" - i.e. nyt front page feed, seeking alpha rss, etc.

I recently instead made a personal rule to just use google reader for blogs that don't post heavily, usually ones curated by a single person.

Having too many feeds is just like having too much physical stuff in your life. I went through my list and paired it down to 100 (from about 300).

That's still too many and I plan to cut it down even more... but it's a weight off my mind to just let all of them go.

A good place to start when pruning your feeds is the "trends" page. http://www.google.com/reader/view/#trends-page

I agree with that sentiment. Every few months when I have some down time, I go through each feed and toss ones that are posting too much. It also allows me to toss ones that I added because they had an interesting post 3 months ago, but had crummy follow-up posts that just clog up reader since I do not read them.

Not useful, marking something as read in google reader is as simple as hitting "next". Pressing a key when I'm reading a page or when I'm reading my feeds isn't very different. And you must remember to do it when you read the page.

Semi OT: Most of my browsing time is in Reader, and I got initially excited about this post since I thought what this was doing was something similar to Fever (http://feedafever.com/), but maybe more powerful.

What I really am looking for is a way to manage my Reader feeds so that links to similar sources (or similar stories) either get grouped or prioritized based on the number of shares a la Techmeme.

Here's the use case. When Google shut down Wave or when the EFF did their analysis of the Google/Verizon deal I had at least 20 feeds linking to the same story, which I didn't really need. I should be able to exclude my Tier 1 feeds so they don't get caught up in these rules (i.e., if Gruber talks about it I want to see it, no matter what). The rest of these stories get buried in a Folder similar to the Gmail spam folder (or label, more accurately); I don't see their unread count but they're there if I suspect I'm missing something.

Plus maybe a bonus option to exclude any stories based on productivity or 8-bit cupcakes.

My solution is a bit plainer and simpler: I read the feeds (and email) before I surf the web. So your problem doesn't arise.

This has much to with your habits. I usually first open Email, Feeds, Twitter and FB and open in new tabs the articles I am interested in. Then if by any chance the ones I find out via twitter or IM, I've already read them before, I don't have to re-read them.

I take it a step further. I use the feeds TO read the web. If I find another site I like, I add its feed to my list. HN is about the only thing I visit that isn't one of my feeds, and that's because it's a ranking service and not just a linear blog.

Probably, yes. It would need to be fully browser-based though. I wouldn't be okay with shipping all of my viewing history to you for it to work.

It would be most useful if it could integrate with my Instapaper workflow. If I visit a page and then hit "read later", that shouldn't be marked read in Google Reader until I've archived or deleted it in Instapaper. Similarly, it would be great if marking something read in Google Reader would archive any matching items in my Instapaper account (this might be way beyond the scope of what you're talking about though).

I would be okay with sharing my Instapaper username/password to make that integration work.

I've been looking for something like this. Often I read posts through either HN or someone's Twitter, while I'm also subscribed to the RSS feed. To have them automatically marked as read would be awesome.

I think it would be useful to have a service that would provide an IMAP style API for others to consume. This service would manage my subscriptions and maintain information about read/unread status, starred items and so on.

The benefit would be that I could easily use different reader applications/services, for example depending on the device I'm using or other needs. This would also make trying out new things, such as the Newsblur much more convenient.

Google Reader is pretty much this - has an API

Are you using the unofficial API (pyrfeed) or Google Ajax feed API?I've played with both last year and first one was broken, second one had limited commercial usage.

Maybe I'm not typical but I don't see dups from other channels that are also in reader all that often so I'm not sure I would find this service very useful. I don't think it solves the stated problem of missing interesting articles either, that makes an assumption that you would see all the important articles outside of reader and if that was the case you should just stop using reader.

if you're a user with, say, 20 feeds, in google reader - we think its valuable being able to match those feeds to what you've read externally. As with that amount of feeds the daily amount of articles is manageable, so its all about pruning it to keep the redundant stuff out.

Another feature I think would be really cool in a tool like this is that it could auto-discover which feeds you read often, even if you haven't subscribed to them. If it detects that you visit blog X often (either deliberately or from being redirected, tweets, etc.), it could recommend that you subscribe.

Marking items you already read would only get rid of about 10% at most of Google Reader's unread count.

This is why I like the Hacker News format of up voting.

Killer app: hacker news style up-voting across any news topic (aka...reddit?)

1) Yes this is useful.

2) Why can't Google do this? They have my search/navigation history and my feeds.

3) I was kinda hoping this provided an aggregated RSS feed of my Google reader. Why? Because I have other devices that accept RSS feeds but I don't want to export OPML and then have 2 separate feeds to keep in sync.

I switched from Google Reader to Friendfeed about two months ago. So far, it's a much better fit for me. It looks and feels like Twitter but you can add RSS feeds (using the "imaginary friends" feature). Like Twitter, there's no "unread items" counter, if you skip something it just drops off the page.

Does this help with buzz updates? It bothers me that if I read buzz updates in gmail that they are still unread in google reader's "friends you follow" and vice versa.

They should make it available also for mobile browsers. I read a lot on my trusty Android while on trains/subways/taxis/etc.

Useful very. Pay for it? No. Hope this helps.

Have you heard of feedly.com ?

I don't think this would make a huge difference to me, as I don't subscribe to enough feeds in GR for it to make a big difference to how I'd use it.

Also, speaking of unread flags [grating record scratch sound] I wrote a Chrome extension to add unread flags to HN comments: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/imeeonmdbakdmiln...

Ugh, that was awkward. Sorry about that.

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