Blastfeed and the Future of RSS Filtering
Blastfeed is the latest in RSS filter products to
cross my virtual desk. Back in April I looked at this
space and at the time noted that filtering would be a hot topic in 2006. Why? Because
it's the next step up from RSS aggregation, as many of us now have too much information
coming at us.
But we're now at the end of November and really, to be frank, there hasn't been much progress made in the RSS filtering space.
First a bit of background about why information filtering is so important. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a post this week explaining how he monitors RSS feeds to get the latest news of interest to him. Like Marshall, I'm an Information Omnivore (I'll devour anything and everything!), but it's important for my business that I not get overwhelmed with information. As it is, I'm guilty of not replying to too many emails - let alone keeping up with the hundreds of RSS feeds I subscribe to. And OK, both Marshall and I are RSS-obsessed bloggers - but in reality nearly everyone is overloaded with information these days, RSS or not.
So what to do to overcome info overload? Marshall hinted in his post that he uses filtering and similar methods:
"I haven't included any discussion about small things like filtering feeds, scraping feeds or using RSS and email together but there's a lot more that can be done with RSS for research than I feel like writing about this morning."
Blastfeed is one of those new kinds of filtering tools. Developed by Paris company 2or3things, Blastfeed enables people to filter individual RSS feeds or groups of feeds. Patrick Ferran from 2or3things told me they're aiming the product at "info-consumers (like yourself) and for the corporate world."
As of now Blastfeed does pretty much the same things as FeedRinse, the RSS filter service I profiled back in April [disclosure: I did a very short bit of consulting to FeedRinse in May]. Both services allow you to input a set of feeds and do filtering on them - essentially creating new feeds, which you then add to your regular RSS Reader. Blastfeed also lets you create email alerts, or a widget for your blog - and IM/SMS notifications are coming soon. In that sense, Blastfeed also has similarities with ZapTxt, which recently introduced new features such as publisher widgets and custom RSS feeds.
One problem with all of these specialist filtering tools is that you can't filter and read in the same place. In my view, RSS filter services are crying out to be full-blown RSS Readers too. Although granted, that's not the case for IM/SMS based services such as ZapTxt. But if you're going to offer a filtering service with RSS output, why not integrate a full-featured RSS Reader?
In other words, I want to do my filtering and reading from the same service. Some of the popular RSS Readers already allow you to do this - think FeedDemon, Blogbridge and Google Reader. So while Blastfeed and FeedRinse are both great services, I question whether I'd want to do my filtering in a separate application to my reading.
Having said that, I like where Blastfeed is heading and I can certainly see a future for advanced stand-alone RSS filtering services. According to Patrick, here is part of what they have planned for the future:
"One other direction we want to take Blastfeed to would be to use it as a platform to manage all kinds of media generating/powering RSS. For instance, TV / VOD providers could send their programs in RSS, and users could actually set a channel for such specific topic of interest. Whenever a TV / VOD content described in the RSS feeds matches the users requirements it could trigger a notification to an application that would record the film for later viewing, etc. Combination with other media assets (Podcasts, videocast, news and blogs feeds, company feeds, etc.) can then be envisaged as well."
So this is an excellent way forward. In summary, while I'd like to have my filtering/reading wrapped up in one service - I also see the benefits of focusing on advanced filtering functionality.
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Thanks for the mention Richard ;)
Stay tuned - We're cranking out more stuff via another quick release.
Cheers,
Sameer
The idea is nice, however I don't really see the need for this to be separated from your RSS reader. Case in point - I read all my RSS in Netvibes and use their simple filtering option, and it's enough for me.
I'm Toomas from Feedreader. I'm quite interested in this feed information filtering thing and I'd really like to add (free) Feedreader to this list. In my personal opinion it has exactly the filtering capability we are talking about here - combine multiple feeds, filter by phrases, tags.... Why I'm writing this - we are already at the moment having nice tools for RSS filtering.
At the same time we are not sleeping either. We have currently in development a special version of Feedreader what can publish smartfeeds (this is our term for feed filtering) to web server, forward by email, forward by instant messaging, let to be accessed by IMAP clients. So you could possibly mix incoming feeds then filter them and finally upload all your smartfeeds to web server for others to subscribe.
Of course I'm talking about desktop application here and this may be irrelevant in the light of latest trends of talking only about online services :). But at the same time my personal viewpoint is that you should not rely too much on (free) online services. Also if you need to manage personal or secure information (also secure feeds) you should think multiple times before adding personal feeds to online service.
I have for long wanted a feed filtering service and haven't been able to find anything satisfactory so far.
The way I would want my feed filtering to work would be:
- Club relevant news together
- Display from a source that you have chosen to be as the most important
- Have a mention that other sources for the same information are also available.
This is similar to the way in which Google news or techmeme or tailrank works.
If somebody can pull this off, it would be great. I wonder why Google can't combine its News filtering algorithm to its reader service.
These feed filtering services based on keywords are like rules set in Outlook. They are too strict.
My turn for a conflict of interest, have you taken a look at feedbite? We have actually supported many of those features for quite a while, however our take is a bit more social. We give our users the option to share their bundles (groups of feeds) which allows other users to add feeds. The intent being to allow the community to help build bundles of feeds with the best possible content. (Little known fact: that's actually how I found out about this site!)
But we also focus some of our energy on what we call "news blogs". Essentially we try to make it easy (through "feed me" links or a firefox addon) to add content you see in other places to your own custom feed, where you can add your own commentary, videos, or even archive the original article (just in case it's taken down). I think these features set us apart.
We also allow our users to vote for their favorite content -- the purpose being to help new users find bundles that contain articles that interest them. Sometimes searching tags just isn't good enough. I know we still have some work to do, but there is a master plan (seriously!) that is being rolled out one piece at a time.
Manual Trackback!
http://www.touchstonelive.com/blog/2006/12/filtering-is-so-5-years-ago.html
Yeah, Richard do you think that the companies that make RSS readers should be developing these type of filtering technologies into their programs?
I think another great option would be for a web site to think about how much info they are pumping out via RSS feeds. They should maybe offer alternate feeds for different topics or for different level of popularity for the items.