Ask HN: Better alternative to daily RSS feeds reading? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Better alternative to daily RSS feeds reading?

18 pointsgreyman24 comments

Every day a few articles interesting to me are being published on the web. What technology do you use to discover them, while filtering out the rest?

I've been using Google Reader for a long time, and while theoretically it should save time by eliminating the need to visit each website individually, I noticed that opposite is sometimes true. The main issues I am struggling with are:

- with more feeds added to the reader, the noise is increased

- the very act of being subscribed to something can create a feeling of "obligation" to check and "clear" the feed.

- the technology fosters the attachment of "checking what's new," in a similar way email does, and that wastes even more time.

Of course, all of those issues can be alleviated by proper feeds curating, unsubscribe mercilessly and insist on discipline to not check the feeds too often.

Anyway, I feel there is a time to discover/invent some new technology to deliver my daily reading to me, something which would avoid the need to subscribe to sources. Recently, for example, I discovered that when something truly interesting is published, it will usually appear on twitter, and also being retweeted several times. I've been quite successful to use twitter search to discover new stuff for the keywords I am interested about, and the services like Tweetmeme are promising, too. But I didn't found yet some service which I can truly replace Google Reader with. Maybe that's also a good startup idea. What's your experience?

I really don't have a better alternative as I'm kinda struggling with the same problem.

Anyway, my interests are kinda broad, so to use "curated feeds" like Hacker News or basing them on Twitter volume wouldn't really do it for me. Also I quite enjoy finding unexpected things that I didn't even know I'd be interested in.

I'm an information junkie, what can I say.

I DO know quite well what I'm NOT interested in though. Very few solutions let me filter out crap I'm NOT interested in. I think that approach would work the best for me.

I wish information I read was accurately classified using some standard metadata conventions. It'd be so much easier to deal with. Obviously with the sheer volume of data, and the diversity of the sources, that's probably completely impossible to do in any reasonable way. Still, I wonder, if a popular RSS platform would implement some sort of standard, and then let their sources come on board if they wished to...I wonder how quickly it'd be adopted.

>I DO know quite well what I'm NOT interested in though. Very few solutions let me filter out crap I'm NOT interested in.

Yes, you know what you're not interested in. But can you express that in a machinable fashion? " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it " only helps you after you've already seen it.

Alternately, if you could create the machine to take a human's loose description of what they're not interested in and filter it out, there are any number of ways to turn that into big money AND big benefit to society. (In very loose terms, that's what search engines do...)

Weird, I thought I was the only one who did that. Google Reader is an awesome tool, but it is also a time sink. I've had to close the browser and keep it closed, even nixing out Twhirl to remove the Twitter noise as well. Unfortunately, when I get back, the entire thing is flooded with good information I want to read and keep up with, and I've probably missed the latest announcements from big industry players (i.e. last week, I missed the Apple refreshes).

I find myself emailing articles to myself instead of reading them, and then when I get home post-work day I end up deleting them instead of reading them. Vicious cycle.

I moved noisy feeds out of Google Reader and into FriendFeed. I use the FriendFeed notifier http://friendfeed.com/about/notifier to have items popup on my screen in real-time. If you follow a few key people & feeds on FriendFeed, all the interesting news should reach you.

It's mostly invasive, and now I don't have to constantly check anything and I don't feel like I'm missing anything either. If it's important it will probably popup more than once. In fact, it's how I noticed this post http://friendfeed.com/newsyc

I got so tired of this problem I created my own service:

http://www.ectofeed.com/

It takes a bit to set up the filters, but once you do it gets rid of all kinds of junk. I've experimented with the services that claim to be able to watch what you read/mark/save and cater your feeds accordingly, and have found them to be greatly lacking. I just don't think we're there yet in terms of what AI and similar technologies are capable of.

Anyway, you're welcome to give it a try. Feedback is always appreciated.

I have been using Shaun Inman's Fever (http://feedafever.com/) recently to try and filter out what is 'hot'. Its an RSS reader but lets you have feeds that are only used as indications to link up other good posts. It works by showing you articles that lots of people are linking to.

What do you think of it?

Fever requires you to create a server from which to run it, pretty shabby for a service you pay for to not have dedicated servers.

I use hacker news. Seriously though, I've been wishing google reader allowed you to rate what articles you like and to what degree you like them, then have an algorithm sort them by how much it thinks you would like them. Maybe I should make that...

EDIT: looks like people mentioned services that do something similar.

http://feedscrub.com is such a service

This is quite a comical comment given today's earlier HN article about how google has done exactly this, sort by magic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=900345

Alas it didn't last long in the rankings.

Google Reader now has 'sort by magic'. It sorta does what you describe.

Broadersheet is a startup trying to solve this sort of problem. They have an iPhone app which serves up an electronic newspaper personalised to your interests. (Sadly they don't yet cater to iPhone denialists like me, so I can't report from direct experience how good it is.)

Lots of sites listed so far, but not more than one vote for any. Doesn't inspire much :\

You're certainly not alone; too many of us suffer from this problem. Maybe it's time for you to invent something?

Why not use something like www.postrank.com? I'm pretty sure that's why it was made, to solve the problem of reducing all the noise and only showing you the best content.

Very helpful, & i'm very appreciative. http://www.newsbrane.com suggestion from DTrejo seems 2 be a winner 4 me.

It doesn't help that many writers and publications use clever and cryptic headlines that often are the sole way of judging whether an item is worth clicking or not.

Tweetie + Instapaper was my replacement for Google reader. I dont have to mark tweets as read as well. Lazyfeed is good too.

You might like http://www.newsbrane.com

http://www.lazyfeed.com

http://feedhub.com

Sounds like a newspaper!

But how would newspaper know what interests me?

Well, I was implying that the newspaper editors would cull the most interesting bits of news for you. Or perhaps you could wait for your mom to clip articles and send them to you in the mail.

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