Thursday, December 01, 2005

RSS Reader Wishlist

In the spirit of Christmas gifting (is that spirit at all, well I certainly have fun giving and getting!), I really, really want these three features implemented into Newsgator Online (anyone know if these features exist in another aggregator?):

1 - With work piling on and a minor tweek in career direction I can no longer keep up with my current 255 feeds (+5 non-RSS-able websites which are soon going to be dropped if they don't get their act in gear and provide full feed RSS), it just takes too much time to go through them and be able to follow up on the interesting posts. The result is a pile of "interesting links" I have saved but never seem to find the time to get to. What I want is to be able to pause feeds whenever I want while still maintaining them in my list so I can easily re-activate them when I later have time or am interested in a particular subject. This also lets me pause some borderline feeds so I can see if I miss em or not :-)

2 - To be able to "vote" or give a "check point" to posts that I actually read or find valuable. This way I can go back over the past week/month/year etc. and see which posts I'm actually reading and find valuable. You'd think this would be intuitive ("just remember which ones you read dude!") but it's actually almost impossible for me now to remember what things I read where and how often I find something interesting on each feed. I have my feeds broken up into different subjects/categories and rarely look at the individual site I'm reading. This would help immensely with weeding out the weak feeds and reducing useless excess posts. An added bonus, let me choose to make my selections public or not, you'd be almost competing with digg at that point, hmmm, there's an idea... Anyways, NewsGator Online has that 5 star ranking system for each post, perhaps there's a way to utilise that to achieve the above?

3 - Standard RSS subscribe button. This is more for my less than technically adept friends and family (well actually I really want this too!) to make things easier. It'll clean up website sidebars, make it easier for customers to subscribe to your content... and it's just better. I'm not saying you need to standardize all aggregators, I'm not even campaigning for a standard location on the website for it, but there should definitely be a common subscribe button guys!

That's my RSS aggregator wishlist... as for my other Christmas desires, go check out my Amazon wishlist ;-) Or just grab me a tablet, xbox 360, treo, oh my it's going to be a great season for gizmo's! :-)

I'm also moving to the regular NewsGator service soon because I'll be working out of Outlook all day at work and because of its sync with NewsGator Online. We'll see how that goes. One of my new years resolutions is to try out more of those software packages that I never seem to get around to trying... more on that resolutions list soon ;-)

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