Feeds feeds feeds, seems like that's all I'm dealing with anymore. Feeds from different sources; my feeds, my friends' feeds, strangers' feeds, and sites' feeds. Feeds of different content types; blog feeds, music feeds, video feeds, photo feeds, link feeds, activity feeds, event feeds, news feeds, message feeds. Big feeds, little feeds, interesting feeds, and boring feeds. So much data coming down so many pipes, what are supposed to do with it all!?
The problem is that feeds come in all different types and yet we try to manage them all with the same tools. Feedreaders try to help us manage these multitudinous data channels but are quickly overwhelmed by the static. Perhaps a better understanding of what we're dealing with could help us organize them better.
Strangers' feedsThese are feeds that are produced by people you don't know very well. Often times they are composed of entries from a varity of authors. Popular blogs like
BoingBoing,
ReadWriteWeb, and
Techcrunch fall into this category. Even if you know the guys who write them, the entries are targetted at the world at large not little old you, and so you can never really tell how interesting they will be. Good sources of these are
Digg,
Del.icio.us, and other social news sites since the stories will be pre-sorted for interestingness, but they also happen to be the most chatty.
These are what feedreaders were built for. All you have to do to manage them is add them to your feedreader, categorize, and read at your leisure. You might skip a few days and return to find your feed reader is packed with unread posts, but since none of the entries was specifically meant to be read by you, you can usually just "mark all as read" and start fresh.
Update feedsSome sites produce feeds to let you know about changes.
Flickr gives you a feed of your most recent comments, and Dreamhost provides a feed of their hosting status to alert customers about downtime. These feeds serve the purpose that email has dutifully served for years. These feeds are most often produced by a website, not a human, but sometimes, in the case of comment and discussion feeds they are made by people. The main difference between these and Strangers' feeds is that they are guaranteed to be relevant to you. Why else would the site have made a feed specially for you!?
Putting these feeds in a feed reader can cause problems. What if an important item gets lost in the fray? Someone sends you a direct message on
Twitter, or a comment on
Disqus? You can put all these in a folder in your news reader, but then what if you miss something because of the millions of entries that show up in
Digg's Top Stories feed?
The best way to deal with Update feeds is the same tool that you've been using to get these updates all along; your trusty mail client. Most mail clients have allowed you to subscribe to feeds since the early days of RSS. Mail.app has a decent one, as does Thunderbird. Putting all of your Update feeds in your mail client will ensure that you check them frequently, and most mail clients even alert you when you get a new item. Sure news readers can do this too, but your update feeds will likely be a drop in the bucket compared to the firehose of news articles that quickly start flowing into your newsreader.
Friends' FeedsStrangers's feeds are meant for the world at large, and Update feeds are meant for you and you primarily, but Friends' feeds lay somewhere in between. They are produced by people you know, so it's a safe bet you'll want to see some of the things in them, but likely not all of them. If you have many friends who like to use social media, you'll have quite a few entries to look through. However, depending on your friends' editorial skills they might take longer to browse because you'll have to follow links and find out what they are about for yourself. There's likely to be a bunch of boring stuff in these, but if you want other people to look at what you make, you have to do due diligence and consume their content too. It might even make you better friends!
There are three kinds of Friend feeds. The first are
individual feeds from individual sites. Your friend will have as many of these as they have website accounts, and there's no way to keep up with whether or not they are even updating them anymore, so they are largely junk.
The next type of feed is the
my friends feed that social websites often offer. These feeds will give you all the content that your friends on that site are making. If any of the social networks would allow a truly open social graph (I'm looking at you
Facebook and
MySpace) you'd be able to get all your friends' content on any new site you joined. Unfortunately, each site has it's own "friends list", and you're going to have a hard time "friending" all the people you know on every site you ever use.
The last type of feed that your friends might make is what you might call an
aggregated feed or
lifestream. I'll talk about these more in a second, but they are basically a collection of all the content that your friend makes on lots of different sites. These are a great way to subscribe to your friends' content. The only catch is that they have to actually build one for you to subscribe to. With more and more sites offering users ways to generate content and syndicate it with feeds, and many excellent lifestreaming applications available this will soon be the preferable way of keeping up with what your friends are doing online.
So it should be pretty clear what these feeds, are and why you want to read them, so how do you manage them? To tell the truth, I don't know yet. When I put them in my feedreader they cause a lot of noise, and irritation since they are rarely self-explainatory. The best way I've found to consume these feeds is with
FriendFeed. If your friends are on FriendFeed, you can easily find them, and immediately get access to all their feeds. Trouble is, not everyone you know is going to use FriendFeed. For those few of your friends who refuse to get a FriendFeed account, you can create "imaginary friends", but you have to manually add all their accounts on every site that you know they use. FriendFeed also has quirks that make it less than ideal in my opinion, and I just hate having to build yet another friends list.
My FeedsThe last type of feed--not to mention my favorite being that I'm shamelessly self-interested--are the ones that we generate ourselves. I'm not just talking about your blog, but your
Flickr photos, your
YouTube favorites, your
Delicious links, your
Tweets, and every other feed that is full of stuff that you made. These feeds are of no interest to you because you already know what's in them, but your friends and family might already be subscribed to a few of them. The trouble is that unless you're as famous as
Kevin Rose, nobody's going to go the trouble of finding all those feeds, let alone subscribing to each and every one.
The trick to managing these feeds is to "aggregate" them into one all-encompasing "lifestream". There are many ways to do this. If you're a do-it-yourselfer like me, you might opt to build a
Yahoo Pipe, or use
SimplePie to mash together your feeds. If you don't want to get your hands dirty there are myriad services that will do it for you,
Tumblr.com,
Soup.io,
Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed.com, and
Swurl.com are some examples of sites that do this. Some do the job better than others. Tumblr for example only allows you to add a certain number of feeds, and FriendFeed truncates entries. Most of these further complicates the issue by having content creation fetures of their own which means one more feed to add to your collection.
But is mashing your content together all there is to be done with those feeds you spend all your time at work building? I don't think so, and that's why I built
Agglodex.com a site that not only aggregates all the feeds you make, but also analyzes the entries you create to determine what you're interested in. It can use that information to reccomend similar users, and entries you might like to see. It can even share your interests with other sites using a new type of feed called APML. You could give such a feed to a site like
Digg and it could show you articles that you might be interested in, or give it to
NetFlix and get better movie recomendations.
ConclusionI hope I've helped to illuminate the world of feeds in all their varieties, and given you some ideas about how to organize them all. I truly love feeds for liberating all the user generated content on the web from the confines of the sites where it's made. I've always seen the immense potential of all that data, and have explored it for years.
Agglodex.com is the outcome of years of ideas, and research. In the few months that I've been tinkering with it I've been so excited to see if people will use it. Now it's ready for users. So please sign up and add some of your feeds.
