Filter Google Reader by Item Popularity With New AideRSS Plug-in
Overwhelmed with all the content coming through your Google Reader? Want to skim just the top stories from any feed you're looking at? Canadian RSS filtering service AideRSS today launched a new Firefox plug-in that lays the company's unique "filter by popularity" features over the top of Google Reader. Limited beta invites are available below.
AideRSS's "post rank" algorithm scores items in any feed for the number of comments, Diggs, tags in Del.icio.us and inbound links it's got. You can then view, or subscribe by RSS, to just the 50%, 20% or most popular items inside that particular feed. The new Firefox plug-in lets you apply these filters on the fly inside Google Reader with just two clicks.
The first 200 RWW readers that click through this link can get access to the plug-in immediately. The plugin uses GreaseMonkey (no separate download required), which the company says isn't playing nicely with the wonderful new Firefox 3 Beta, so FF3 users won't be able to use it yet. Update: We're hearing reports that you can turn disable addon version checking in Firefox and then use this plug-in with FF 3 Beta. Likewise, in the spirit of "it's in private Beta" users with Greasemonkey already installed and turned on may need to turn it off first. See this customer service thread for details.
Here at RWW we use AideRSS regularly, some of us daily. It produces simple, powerful and clearly useful results. In addition to using it in any feed reader, there's all kinds of other things you can do with a feed filtered by popularity. See, for example, our recent post on bricolage blogs ("10 Sites for Finding Wonderful Things"), where the most popular items from 10 prolific blogs are filtered using AideRSS and displayed dynamically using FeedDigest.
AideRSS can filter almost any RSS feed, including tag and search feeds. Popularity, as expressed by explicit attention gestures like AideRSS indexes, may not be the perfect determination of quality - but it's not a bad start at all. AideRSS is a great little tool and we expect that many Google Reader users will find this new extension very useful.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Just a friendly reminder that fav.or.it already has this functionality build right into it (with requirement of plugins etc). And our ratings are based upon 'attention data' - the number of minutes spent reading posts and voting (in combination).
Alongside this we have a whole load of features google reader does not (and will never get even with grease monkey)
* Integrating commenting
* Conversation tracking - http://blog.fav.or.it/2008/03/31/giving-the-conversation-back-to-the-blog/
* Integrated blog catalog
Nick, that's good to know, but time spent reading and voting are different metrics. It's nice to track popularity according to what a large number of users are already doing - tagging in del.icio.us, linking on blogs - does Favor.it do that?
We do take account of links between blogs yes, but attention data is what is important to us, and we will have a large number of users which will make it relevant, and because our system is accessible to a much wider demographic than any other reader (as you do not need to understand RSS or need plugins etc) then our data will have much less of a bias towards the habits of the tech savy crowd.
We do also integrate with del.icio.us for people to share out to it, but we could certainly look at what information we could extract.
Simply wonderful
Posted by: pbastien.myopenid.com
|
April 1, 2008 10:07 AM
Nick, the extension as it exists today is really just a demo of the possibilities of our API's. Everything that you see in GoogleReader can be replicated in any reader - even favor.it!
In fact, that could be a very interesting application. :)
I don't understand what is the point of comparing two systems, when one is open to the public the other is not. Let's leave the comparison when they are both open to the public please.
Just tried AideRSS on googlereader and seems really interesting. thanks!
This extension breaks the URL bar in Firefox 2 for me. It doesn't update with the new address when I switch tabs or navigate to a new site. Kind of an odd bug...
Nick, I have to agree with the poster stating that it's a bit unfair to do a feature comparison for a service that is still in private beta...unless of course you ended the comment with invitation codes for users that want to verify the features themselves :)
@Noah: I ran into the same problem before as well. It's a bug with GreaseMonkey compiler, which we're working on, and hoping to have a fix for soon.
Just my 2 cents. I use and like AideRSS a lot. I have downloaded and tried this plugin and it works! I have one quip. It really only works when I select the blog feed itself. If I select 'All items' which is a very useful way to read, then the plugin does not work. That is a pity and limits it's usefulness somewhat.
Don't forget high ratings are not everything. If a post is new it won't have high ratings even if it is a great read.
Over fav.or.it - it's beta invite as far as I know. And I'm still waiting for that invite even though I have signed up :D
The automatic focus in the url bar on my browser (FF 2.0.0.13/ Mac OSX) is messed up since I installed this extension
DC, sounds like a problem with the XPI - we're working on the fix. In the meantime, ping us with your email and we can forward you the Greasemonkey script directly (which doesn't have this problem). My contact is: ilya _at_ aiderss dot com
As well, 'all items' and 'folder' views are next on our list to enable. Stay tuned!