Over at Mashable Ben Parr wonders, “What is the future of RSS? Is social media a better alternative?” My question for Ben is, why force ourselves to choose one or the other? Why not push for something better?
In the past two years, I have switched several times between feedreaders like Google Reader and social news sites like Reddit, Twitter and Friendfeed. Feedreaders amplify the volume of my reading. Social news helps me find the highest quality stories. And this tension between quality and quantity keeps me switching.
With growing volumes of news in an increasingly online world, feedreaders and social news are each incomplete.
Feedreaders assume you want to read everything by everyone you subscribe to, and nothing by anyone else. Subscribe to too many, and those assumptions break down. Chronological ordering starts to suck. Frequent writers drown out the rest, regardless of who you care about. Sifting through the noise becomes a challenge.
The popularity of social news is largely explained by this challenge.
Ten percent of the users on a social news site vote on stories, and only 1% comment. The rest of us are all using social news purely to find interesting stories, often because the feedreader didn’t work out.
But using a social news site has its own drawbacks. You can’t find as many stories. Stay at the front page or in a small community, and filtering works. Lower down the list, quality drops. A larger community provides faster turnover, but it’s also susceptible to lowest-common-denominator effects - think pictures of lolcats or youtube videos.
Even when filtering works, you only find stories your friends find interesting. Over time, you start to ignore interests that don’t overlap with your network. You risk spending time reading low-quality comments or flame wars. Echo chamber effects suppress dissenting voices, though those are often the most interesting.
So where does that leave us?
The essential feature of both feedreaders and social news sites: they aggregate content from many sources before presenting it to the reader. We need a better aggregator, a feedreader that can handle firehoses. One that can rank stories smarter than just chronologically or alphabetically, perhaps even adapt to our changing interests.
What would such an aggregator look like? It would have scale, to discover feeds quickly, and to crawl all the feeds out there. It would have smarts, to connect you up with only the stories you find interesting, and to prioritize them. These are big changes; the new tool looks nothing like its forebears. What it resembles most is a search engine.
Think about it. It crawls and indexes everything it can find, just like a search engine. Rather than responding to queries, it knows you and your tastes and alerts you to interesting pages. It can be consumed in multiple layouts wherever you go - facebook, twitter, or your feedreader.
This is the vision for MeeHive, the personal news service our team at Kosmix is building. We’re working to solve the problem of crawling the blogosphere and indexing the stream of stories as they are published. We match stories to the interests you provide, and sort them intelligently to highlight the recent and popular stories most likely to be relevant to you. Atop our recommendations, we allow you to circulate your own favorites among your friends. We think that approach provides the best of both worlds.
We just introduced MeeHive in March, and we’re continuing to iterate to make the product better day by day. Our goal is to make the leap online from RSS to smart recommendations, so people can spend less time sifting through noise and more time reading.
Posted also at AltSearchEngines.
