Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I think if digg changed their entire concept around into one that takes all of the news and combines stories into threads, ala techmeme, they'd be a king again. I'd love to have the stories from TC, read write web, and all the other blogs on a particular topic consolidated into one story with links to the externals, an intelligent description created from all the posts combined, and maybe even a little meter to weigh the particular blogs/sites involved.

Right now Digg is just adding to the information overload. I think we're all pretty exhausted with information. I'll see something pop up on twitter, I'll see it here as well, or on my RSS reader from another site. We're all talking about similar things. We need a global sort of decentralized "permalink" concept. Digg has the resources to do this. They can "digg" the web, instead of me digging stories. They'll find out what's hot via continuing user submissions, observing the twittersphere, popular blogs, etc... and then report to me a summary of everything regarding, for example, OpenSolaris being canned.

Yet another chaotic "stream of conciousness" comment from me... but I'm just getting the discussion going.

EDIT: this could work for everything... I obviously care mostly about tech and shy away from politics, but it would be cool to have all topics of a particular issue, with their weight on the political spectrum. Just another example.

We need Google's "Priority Inbox" for RSS feeds. The signal to noise ratio in my newsfeed "inbox" is way out of whack.

Google Reader has "sort by magic", which basically does that by ordering posts by how much it thinks you want to read them.

Rather than an AI algorithm which needs to learn my personality or needs me to learn its personality, so I can direct it better, I would prefer to have a social network leveraging RSS reader. One which understands that I have already mentally delegated the cognitive load for various topics to people I know, who I accept as knowing more than me on those topics. I'm going to need to ask them later if some story is BS or not anyway, why not put that process in the RSS readers?

Posts user A has read and liked would trickle though the social graph out to other users who have delegated to user A in on the related topics (or delegated to someone who delegated to A, etc). Sort of distributing the job previously done by a newspaper's editors out to the people I know and already trust in those sections/topics.

http://labs.postrank.com/gr

I'm so sad that Google lags on deploying these features to the apps accounts. I'd love a "Give me all Gmail features, when they happen" option for my Google apps account. But, don't even get me started on how effed up the integration with all of that is. I want michael@whalesalad.com to be my google ID, not some random gmail address I had to create. UGH.

For what it's worth, the Priority Inbox is supposed to be rolled out to Apps users at the same time as the general rollout in the next week.

I have the priority inbox in my Gmail and in my Apps right now. As far as my accounts go, they were rolled out simultaneously today.

I circumvent this by having a gmail account and an apps account, forwarding everything from the apps account to my gmail, and using the "Send mail as" feature to complete the illusion.

Check out http://www.newsblur.com/. The guy who made it has a background in AI, and designed it to analyze stories and guess what you will/won't be interested in.

I just tried it out. It seems slow, clunky, and often unresponsive.

could this be what you really want?

Not likely.

Sorry about those bugs. They've been fixed now! The slowness was caused by scaling issues which have now been resolved. Everything is super-fast again.

There's a decent amount of overlap among the feeds I read. I would love to see Google Reader combine any articles that point to the same link into a single thread.

Check out Fever: http://feedafever.com/

I actually own a license, but I never enjoyed it.

I never wanted to pay for it, but the idea excites me.

What didn't you like about it?

That inbox-esque aspect is one reason I just stopped using RSS entirely. There are some nice aspects to it, but on the whole, I feel that the read/unread business bugs me more than it helps me. I'm not sure where I saw this analogy, but it really does feel as if a magazine had this "53 STORIES YOU STILL HAVEN'T READ" counter flashing at me. I'd rather just read the magazine as I want to, and throw it out when I'm done. Same with websites--- I'll visit and read them if I want to read their content. No reason I need it pushed to me with some software keeping track of reading it as if it were a TODO list. Sometimes I forget about particular sites or blogs for months, and then remember and read them, and somehow that's fine with me too, since much of the best content isn't so time-sensitive that I need to know about new articles within a day of them coming out.

I believe you are describing the technology behind http://www.newspond.com/ -- without the existence of user-manipulated weight (up/down vote).

How is that different from Techmeme?

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