Comments for Prioritize Your Feed Reading: Newsgator Integrates AideRSS

Prioritize Your Feed Reading: Newsgator Integrates AideRSS

2008-04-18T18:29:51Z

Newsgator Online, the company's web-based feed reader and until now a relatively weak product, rolled out a feature today that makes the service worth another look.

One of our favorite filtering services, AideRSS, is now ranking by popularity the individual items in feeds you subscribe to. Newsgator users can now read the most commented on, linked-to, Dugg and saved in del.icio.us posts in either a single feed or across the bulk of their subscriptions.

]]> This is something that AideRSS began offering Google Reader users earlier this month, but that implementation wasn't as simple or elegant. It may be more powerful, though. AideRSS is a simple but powerful service that filters out just the most popular items in any feed. We use it frequently here, we used it to highlight the "greatest hits" of ten selected blogs about wonderful things for example.

Newsgator Online has long been slower, uglier and more awkward to use than the company's other consumer products like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon. It's been much improved lately in all those matters and now offers personalized feed recommendations. Newsgator also publishes an APML file for each user's activity, though it's export only so far.

Limitations

The AideRSS processing is limited at launch to the 1000 most subscribed-to blogs in Newsgator. That means this is good for casual use, but one of the biggest benefits of AideRSS is its ability to process any RSS feed. I regularly use it to filter obscure blogs or blogsearch feeds, for example. You can imagine the processing power that would require though. Starting with the 1000 most popular feeds sounds like a great solution to me.

Right now it's only Newsgator Online where this integration is available - not, for example in NetNewsWire. Since the company's desktop products sync with its online and mobile readers - it would be great if users could read at home on the desktop readers (which are some of the best products on the market) and then read just AideRSS filtered highlights on the road by mobile.

We'll see where this goes, but for now I would recommend exporting your feeds out of whatever reader you currently use, importing them into a Newsgator Online account and giving the AideRSS view a try. It's pretty handy and OPML makes it very easy to try out.

If you're interested in RSS filtering for popularity, check out RSSMeme's new FriendFeed filter, too. It looks pretty hot.

See the screenshot below, articles truncated here but full feed display is also available. AideRSS ranking is displayed in the bottom right of each item.

Comment from Justin Kistner on 2008-04-18

2008-04-18T19:00:16Z

Whoa, this is totally useful! APML to follow?

Comment from Jeff Nolan on 2008-04-18

2008-04-18T20:02:39Z

Marshall,
We are indexing the top 1000 feeds for a couple of a reasons but the primary one is that AideRSS doesn't have scores for all of the 2.5 million feeds we process every day so dumping that many feeds on their service was deemed to be an unwise risk. There is also a turnaround time from when a new feed is added to AideRSS and when they return scores, which presented a challenge from the UI standpoint. But all of those are relatively minor issues.

You say "AideRSS is its ability to process any RSS feed" but that is in itself not entirely useful because of the way that Postrank is derived. RWW is a top blog and as a consequence you have plenty of links, comments, trackbacks, etc. to calculate a score, but the vast majority of blogs simply won't score because of audience size and external data points that are used to calculate PostRank. The simple fact is that a significant number of blogs we all read won't have any postrank scoring. BTW, the same goes for our own Activity Scoring, it only works when a blog has some measure of audience from which to compile the attention stream.

This is a starting point for our respective companies, the next phase will focus on greater integration of the scoring algorithms and more end point exposure, e.g. in widgets.

Comment from Siddharth on 2008-04-19

2008-04-19T10:26:25Z

I personaly use Google and AOL feed readers. I you recommner I will give a look to revised Newsgator.

Comment from Frank Sinton on 2008-04-19

2008-04-19T20:28:37Z

Sounds very promising. I will have to take a look at AideRSS for use within Mefeedia. But I have a feeling it is probably only useful for videoblogs running on blogging platforms. Do you know?

Comment from Pedro on 2008-04-21

2008-04-22T02:38:55Z

I found this article very useful involving AideRSS and Yahoo! Pipes.

http://www.metafluence.com/integrating-netvibes-pipes-aiderss-dapper-for-an-intelligence-dashboard/

Comment from singpolyma.net on 2008-04-24

2008-04-24T14:47:26Z

"the vast majority of blogs simply won't score because of audience size and external data points that are used to calculate PostRank"

I would mostly disagree. While there are some blogs/feeds that receive NO comments, NO del.icio.us bookmarks, and NO links from other blogs (and thus no PostRank) - this is uncommon. Most small blogs still receive some comments and backlinks, and often the occasional bookmark. The beauty of PostRank is the normalization of data against your own blog's history - so if you don't get many stats, a few stats more than normal boosts your rank *a lot*, thus making the system useful even on smaller blogs.