Hacker News Reader

Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

I used to go through cycles reading RSS feeds and declaring RSS bankruptcy, but I've given up.

I need a priority queue RSS reader. Show me the N most "important" posts across all my feeds since I last visited. Importance would be calculated a number of ways:

* Prioritize posts from low volume feeds. I probably want to see every post from a friend who blogs once a month, but not every post from Engadget.

* Most favorited/liked/whatever, especially among my friends.

* Similar posts to things I've favorited/liked/whatever in the past.

* Manually tagging certain feeds as important.

Also, I have this problem other "streams" of information, like Twitter, and email (Gmail's Priority Inbox is a good start). Some people I follow post a lot of useless stuff, but I still follow them because they're friends or sometimes say interesting things.

Is there anything remotely like this out there?

View on HN

Google Reader's "sort by magic" (under "View settings") might work for you:

""" A third option, Sort by magic will rank items by "magic." Personalized magic ranking is automatically generated, taking into account your past reading behavior (including liking and starring) and global signals. We'll do our best to display items in the most relevant and interesting order -- click the Like button on things you think are important or enjoy reading, and we'll learn to put items like that first. """

http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Looks promising, I'll try it.

Ideally it would hide all but the top 10 or 50 or 100 posts, and if I finish reading those I could see more. Opening up an RSS reader and seeing hundreds or thousands of unread posts is discouraging.

Shaun Inman's Fever[1] tries to do some of this. Items that are linked to from multiple feeds float to the top of your reading list. You can also add "sparks", which you will never get to see the contents of however they will be used to help figure out which other items to float up to the top of your list.

Self-hosted, PHP, $30. Works on Desktop and has an iPhone skin as well.

[1] http://feedafever.com/

There are a couple ways to achieve this: Sites like: Lynk.ly, Summify.com or thesharedweb.com rank your twitter and facebook feeds and give you top links across them.

I follow digg, techcrunch and mashable ... on twtter and get the links across these sites ranked for me.

BTW, disclaimer, I did write lynk.ly with a friend hence I also provided some of the alternatives.

We're building a "Priority Inbox for News" that's the opposite of sort by magic: all the factors that determine priority (you mention some of the key ones) can be exposed and tweaked.

Sign on up! We're close to alpha.

http://signup.linktamer.com/

isn't that HN?

and please don't downvote, I'm being serious.

HN has essentially been my replacement, but it only covers certain topics, not the long tail. For example my friends' blog posts might not be popular enough for HN (or at all related) but I still want to see them.

Also, if everyone just read HN where would the submissions come from?

NewsBlur (big comment thread above) does this to some degree at least.

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