I love the convenience of RSS, but one of the problems of life inside the feed reader is that once you find a few dozen feeds you want to follow, the cost of adding a new feed becomes too high. When you find a site you like, you think, “Gee, I want to subscribe — but do I really want to add another feed? I can’t keep up with the ones I have!” (I know that the casual “River of News” approach, where you just let the stuff stream by you, would mean no guilt over not keeping up, but I haven’t achieved that level of Taoism detachment yet.) So over time we stop adding new feeds to our RSS diet. This perpetuates the “first-mover advantage” and makes it harder for newcomers to gain subscribers. (They still can, and do, of course.)
Here, as I mentioned in my BarCamp post, is my idea for a feature that RSS readers should but don’t (as far as I know) have: a sort of “New Feed Probation” or “Test Drive” zone. New feeds you subscribe to are automatically placed here (unless you deliberately put them somewhere else). They remain here for a preset time period (a week, a month, whatever you choose). At the end of that period, your reader flags the feed for you, tells you how much you’ve read it, and asks whether you want to keep it or not. You can see whether you actually ended up reading much of it during the “trial period,” and make an informed choice.
Sure, you could do all this yourself, manually. (I do, sometimes!) But wouldn’t it be nice if the reader helped you with this clerical task — and, in the process, encouraged you to explore new information sources and blogs?
[tags]rss, feed readers[/tags]
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