Ugh! Ack! Stop it. Life is too short to see old blog posts, god forbid blog posts I’ve already read.
Priorities
In every application you have to figure out what your SLAs are, and this shapes every choice you make.
If you’re writing an aggregator (or maintaining an existing one) your first priority should be suppressing false positives for newness, everything else pales in comparison.
Despite the obvious geek-macho appeal optimizing timeliness is way way down the list.
LazyWeb: Suppressed Blog Posts
Wanted: a plugin for WordPress that holds back from the feeds all new content for 6 to 12 hours (depending on length, and categories) so you don’t have to see me correcting all my spelling mistakes in painful real time. (might also be useful in cutting down on real dumb blog posts)
Bloglines
Bloglines get your act together, you’ve been terrible for weeks, and I don’t have time for this. This morning I got a blog post from Caterina announcing Yahoo’s acquisition of del.icio.us. I’ve been a user, fan and evangelist for 4 years, I hate every other online aggregator I’ve tried, but I’m leaving if this continues.
Was very unsettling to get back from a weekend of being largely offline last night to find both del.icio.us and Bloglines down. I had to read a book and go to bed.
Anyone else heard the rumor that Bloglines has been bought? No announcement on Mark’s blog, or to the internal list. Word on the street is they were purchased by Ask Jeeves, who has always been decidedly third rate. Alas.
update 2: I’m also hearing that flickr has fallen off the wagon (at the insistences of their funders), and will be going to Yahoo. Wonder how long till we see something on the flickr blog
update 3: Mark on the acquisition. No one else seems to have an independent source for the flickr rumor, but I’m sticking to it (I’ve heard a figure, but that seems confidential)
Bloglines launched their references feature last week. Its a link from an item you’re reading, to people who linked to that item. As the database starts to populate, I’ve found its all a great way to skim the high traffic, high popularity feeds (like thoses of major corporate media) for items of interest. Let the NYTimes, or BBC back up for a couple of days, and then skim down the list of 150 new items, looking for highly referenced articles.
As always, the best collaborative filtering works when its built on top of activities people are already doing for themselves.
There seem to be more people getting into the RSS munging game. Kind of funny to think that there would be a need for people to offer add on services to RSS, it feels too conceptually simple, and yet I know several people working on it, and just found FeedBurnerFeedBurner offers a number of services (besides absorbing your bandwidth costs).
Item Stats
They rewrite your element with a unique FeedBurner URL that allows them to track click throughs.
Summary Burner
You publish your full feed, and they’ll pare down the content to a specified length.
Amazon Burner
ala LocalFeeds automatically turn links to Amazon into affiliate links
And several others. Pretty basic.
More interestingly, “authentication services for premium or private feeds” are planned. That could be huge, both in terms of the next generation of RSS, and because unlike the above services it can be genuinely challenging to setup. At one point Bloglines was talking about being in that space, but I think they’ve been keeping busy building an excellent aggregator.
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