I have not been using an RSS reader for months. Lately I have been trying to look at my NetNewsWire again, but there are a couple of things that frustrate me.

The first is that it is not easy for me to share items. I used to be able to clip them, but now that NNW syncs with Google Reader I want an easy way to “share” a post on Google Reader from NNW (maybe this exists, but I haven’t found it).

Also, I don’t want to subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds. Instead I wan to just get a list of relevant posts to me. I have been filling this need with a combination of Hacker News for tech stuff and Newser for news. That isn’t really what I want though.

The first thing I want is a list of posts that people in my network have read, commented on, linked to, shared, etc.

I want it to be sorted by an attention score so that a post that two people in my network read and one commented on places higher than one that just has two reads (which is higher than one with one read, etc).

I am actually hopeful about the future of Facebook because of their new News Feed. If I was a fan of all of my news sources on Facebook (and my network had the same strategy), then the posts that were getting the most attention would be in my News Feed. The problem is that Facebook is not really where I want this information. Secondary problems have to do with the technical aspect of actually getting that data.

The system I want is the same one I described in my 3D Social Networking talk at BarCamp Nashville 2006 (slides). Here is how I think it could work in today’s landscape:

1. Aggregate my social networks. Pull the social graph from where my networking is acknowledging attention to articles. Give a point to the friend score for each one.
2. Try to identify the accounts for that user that also share content but might not have a social network (Disqus, Intense Debate, Delicious, etc)
3. Pull down the content that is shared on those sources, which might include aggregation of their own posts to twitter (via links), on Facebook (via imported notes), etc. Give each occurrence of an article one point for each friend point (connected on three networks and shared on two gives it a 6).
4. Add up the article scores across all of my network and give me a news list sorted by that score.

This would result in a system where the posts of my friend would have an advantage, but posts that multiple of my friends shared would float to the top.

Then, when I am ready to read some news I would be able to go to that one place and see loads of stuff that is relevant to me.

I think it is a hard system to build because there is a whole lot of aggregation and parsing, not to mention a pretty massive database. I also don’t think it is something that could easily generate revenue. I am hoping someone builds it, but I am not holding my breath.

Which brings me back to Facebook.

A few months back they acquired Friend Feed. One of the features that impressed me most about Friend Feed early on was the idea of “imaginary friends”. I think they removed or de-prioritized the feature, but it allowed me to pull content in from additional sources and let it play in Friend Feed’s ranking system. I don’t think it is too far fetched to see something like this make it’s way into Facebook now. If Facebook added Google Reader integration it would go a long way too.

update:
Apparently there are a couple of related posts today, I would have known this earlier if I was using a feed reader. Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore and Why I continue to use Google Reader.

Have you seen ReadBurner.com? It is a service that allows you to post a feed of your “shared items” from Google Reader or your “clippings” from Newsgator/FeedDemon/NetNewsWire. ReadBurner then displays what the most popular items are. It is the latest entry in the “cream floats to the top” category of applications like TechMeme or Digg (and a bazillion others).

It is a great idea, but I must admit I find the implementation a little lacking. The site is not exactly easy on the eyes which makes reading tough. I am also not a fan of having yet another place to leave comments (but someone will solve the decentralized comments problem, some are getting close). Another “huh?” is that there is no real way to browse via topical information. Almost every single blog post on the internet has either categories or tags or both. Why in the world ReadBurner is not displaying a really great tag cloud is beyond me (unless of course they experimented with it and found that the tag cloud turns out to not be really great).

Despite what I wish was better about ReadBurner, I still really like it. It is not exactly useful for me yet, but they are headed in a great direction that can be really useful. How I am reading feeds is starting to change. I used to be a huge “3 pane” reader when my feeds were like my email program. I am much more of a “river of news” reader now. The problem is that the river is not sorted correctly yet. NetNewsWire does a pretty good job of sorting the feeds I am subscribed to based on attention, but as I am adding more feeds of shared items and clippings, I want duplicates to float to the top (which is exactly what ReadBurner does, it is just not my feeds).

It is too bad that this post might sound critical. I am really digging the direction that ReadBurner and NewsGator are headed. I am going to keep trying to use ReadBurner. Hopefully it will become “useful” soon.

P.S. If you have a feed of shared items or clippings, please leave it in the comments. Those are some of my best subscriptions these days.

I just read that Ma.gnolia (my social bookmark application of choice) is starting to provide APML information (read the annoucement). This is very cool.

At BarCamp Nashville I was talking about a concept I had termed “3D Social Networking”. The basic idea was to add attention information to social networks to provide relationship depth. Then that relationship depth could be applied to help prioritize your social inbox. The greatest stumbling block to something like that is finding ways to capture that attention information.

Now we have RSS readers that are publishing APML (NewsGator and NetNewsWire), and Ma.gnolia is publishing APML about bookmarks. I could easily make statzen publish APML about who you link to on your own blog. I am thinking Tweeterboard could/should add APML since attention is essentially what they are tracking. So what communications are missing?

I think we need to reach a critical mass of attention information before APML will be really useful. In order to reach critical mass I think we would need APML information from email and from cell phones. Instant Messaging would be a plus.

An email attention service could pretty easily integrate with any IMAP server. Basically the service would watch the IMAP account and keep track of who you read, reply to, forward, etc. This would work if you used multiple interfaces for the same email account (Outlook/Mail, web client (gmail?), mobile phone).

I think there are apps that can pull call log information from your phone onto your computer. If I am not mistaken, MissingSync (which I use for my Treo) already pulls this information from my Treo. A single “attention observer” application could monitor those call logs as well as the IMAP email account.

Of course, how do you tie an RSS feed to an email address to several phone numbers to an IM account? It is like you need some social networking app that you control so that you can tie this information together. I am thinking DiSo could be the perfect provider.

I am starting to see a clearer picture of how this all could be implemented. The end goal would be to make all of this digital communication easier to manage.

What is 3D Social Networking? The simplest way to put is that 3D Social Networking is about adding depth to relationships in social networking applications (and all applications are now all social networking applications).

The way I broke it down on Saturday was to talk about what the three dimensions are:

1. Do you know them?
2. In what context do you know them?
3. How deep is that relationship?

I think it really gets interesting when getting into defining depth in relationships in a way that computers can understand. Then it becomes really useful when those three dimensions can be used to provide relevance.

I will write more on each of those later.

I was really surprised at the number of questions and comments that I received from my presentation at BarCamp Nashville last weekend. For those of you that weren’t there, I talked about some ideas I have been tossing around about how to make social networking more useful. The title of the talk was “3D Social Networking”. I feared it was a topic that had a lot of potential to result in glassy eyes and bored participants (the exact opposite of what BarCamp is supposed to be all about).

I give presentations fairly regularly as part of my day job. One measure that I use to know if the audience is getting anything from my presentation is the quality of the questions. I was amazed at the quality of the questions last Saturday. Not because I expected the BarCampers to be slouches, but because it demonstrated to me that what I was talking about was really resonating with some people. Dare I say that it was even causing people to think about things in a new paradigm (possibly my ultimate goal in life, resulting from my study of Philosophy).

Over the next few days I am going to try and post more details about the concepts and ideas that I was talking about. I hope to remember enough of the questions to be able to explore those in more detail as well. Hopefully I will be able to get the exact questions if/when there is video of the talk available.