What I Want in a News Reader

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.