Library clips

Feeds 2.0 is a great advanced RSS Reader, just the same, its features are clear and simple that it is as easy to use as a basic reader like NewsHutch…TechCrunch covered it a while back.

It’s killer features are memetracking (clustering related items), tag cloud (view all posts by a topic tag), and personalisation (tracking reading behaviour plus taking into account manual voting of items)…there is also a visualisation tool.

It’s got the must have, river of news reading, or you can read by feed, you can even mark one item as read, and you can choose to have all items expanded or collapsed.
Unlike Rojo, if you expand an item it doesn’t consider it “read”, this is a good thing, it also doesn’t consider it “read” if you vote/rate an item…only clicking the title or marking item as read icon will mark the item as read (and of course mark displayed posts as read or mark whole feed as read).

NOTE: rating/voting an item does contribute to tracking your reading behaviour.

Check out the screencasts at the Feeds 2.0 blog, and this PDF, there is also a podcast.

Lacks

It’s only still in its invite only stage, so it naturally has a lot of work to do before its release, so here is my feedback of what’s currently lacking:

- Mark a folder as read
(only has “mark displayed posts as read” eg. a page of posts)

NOTE: Feeds have both “mark feed as read” and “mark displayed posts as read”

You can view: “all posts”, just “all read posts”, or just “all unread posts”
- Either option has “mark displayed posts as read”, I’d like to mark all as read in one go, not just the posts on the current page

NOTE: you can set the preferences to display 50, 100, etc… posts per page

I’d like to mark items to keep or flag, and then mark the rest as read
- there is no flagging or saved folder (contrary to what they say on their FAQ, maybe it’s coming soon)

(I like in Rojo that I can read my flagged items or even my tagged items, in Newsgator each of your saved folders has an RSS feed.
Google Reader is the same where you can save items and give them tags, then the items in these tags can have a public page, and a feed.
Also each feed folder/tag can also have a public page, and a feed, plus there are 2 more public pages, one for shared items, and the other for starred items…you can also add a widget to your blog.)

Back to Feeds 2.0…

Can’t rename a folder, but you can rename a feed

Can’t sort feeds

Can’t sort folders

OPML export is not a unique URL, also I’d like an OPML for each folder

Can’t have feeds in multiple folders

I can view “all read posts”, but how do I view “read posts” or both read/unread for a folder or a feed

Can’t view posts I’ve read, ie. posts I’ve clicked on the title or rated, flagged or saved (even though these last two features are missing)

Can’t view just posts I’ve rated

Besides saying you can tag, flag items, it also says you are recommended items, but this doesn’t seem to be enabled yet.

If it was we might also be able to also see recommended feeds based on our neighbourhood.

Lacks reverse date reading

Can’t search within a folder or a feed

Can’t create smart feed, ie. search feeds across your subscriptions, and limit this to a feed or folder or perhaps a selection of feeds or folders

I suppose this is not essential, but I like the way SuprGlu and MySyndicaat bring across author tags, so you can view content by author tags, not just by the system tags

This is also not essential, like Chuquet, I’d like to have a list of the most pointed to URL’s from my RSS Reader, ie. in the body of the posts from the feeds in my RSS Reader, what are the most popular URL’s being linked to.

Personalisation

From their FAQ:

“Traditional RSS readers just don’t work efficiently since in a flood of information it can be hard to find important and interesting news. For example, feeds that post frequently, tend to dominate posts. Sources that post less frequently might be buried much deeper. Feeds 2.0 ranks the feeds according to the user’s preferences and brings interesting articles in the first couple of pages.”

“With personalization the system ranks the feeds according to sources a particular user likes, authors and topics he’s interested in, and brings interesting articles first. These are ranked by a score the system has assigned based on what has learned about the user’s preferences. The system creates a dynamic profile of the topics the user likes and the sources he reads most.”

“…there are two ways with which the system learns your preferences: You can either click on the title of each post to read or just click on the heart icon of each post if you are in hurry or if you don’t care to read the entire article but you still like it. By clicking on the down arrow icon of each post you inform the system that you are not particularly interested in the subject of the post.”

Others:
Attensa
Rojo
See more on this post (some of these services also recommend posts).

Memetracking

This clusters related items together, it is a feature I’ve been wanting for ages…it means if there is an article on a topic, other articles about the same topic buried in my RSS Reader will surface and appear together.

Beforehand, sometimes I’d read a post and would start blogging about it, but before I publish the post I first want to know who else is talking about this post…well now Feeds 2.0 does this for you.

eg. My first item about YouTube-Google had several related items from other feeds, this is great all posts about the same topic clustered together.
Well not all items, the first item had about 10 clustered items, then further on down my RSS Reader there was another item about YouTube-Google and this had 5 clustered articles, and this happended a few times more.

NOTE: It will only cluster unread items.

I guess an alternative, is that when I find an article I want to blog about is to check who links to it in Technorati, or BlogPulse Conversation Tracker. But I’d rather limit the clustered items to feeds in my OPML only, plus clustering items works beyond just items that link to each other…some items can still be related even though they don’t link to each other, that’s why I like the text/concept mining methods of Feeds 2.0.

I guess another alternative it to see if it is mentioned in any of the memetrackers, especially those that can personalise to your OPML, such as megite and TailRank…these are great as they also recommend articles (which Feeds 2.0 will soon do, if not already).

These personal memetrackers are not an alternative to personal RSS Readers, as you cannot mark items read/unread, and they don’t show you all items from your feed set, only items it thinks matters.

So I guess Feeds 2.0 does a great job of being a personal RSS Reader with personal memetracking, and recommendation…bravo!

Others:
WizAg
MyFeedz
Newsgator (I think)

Tagcloud

Shows me all posts in my RSS Reader about at topic (tag).

This augments the memetracking feature, whether I’m reading a feed, a folder, or all unread items, etc…there will be a tag cloud describing the current items.

As I mentioned, when reading all unread items, lots of the posts about YouTube-Google were clustered together, but they weren’t in the one cluster.

To do this I chose the YouTube tag in the tag cloud and this displayed all items in my RSS reader (read or unread) about YouTube, and of course those items that had clusters of related items were still displayed the same way.

Although, I wish I could add tags eg. feeds2.com/youtube+google.

Underneath each post tags appear that describe just that item, these tags are not neccessarily in the tag cloud, as the tag cloud only has the most popular tags so to speak.

The tag cloud will just show those tags for the current items you are viewing, but when you click on a tag it will show all items in your RSS Reader about that tag.

I wish you could limit posts with a specific tag to just a folder or feed, at the moment it is just for all items (read/unread).

You might ask, why can’t I have a giant tag cloud for all my read and unread posts, well that is what the search box is for, entering a term is like clicking on a tag…although I would like to browse to see what is available from a giant tag cloud.

There is a similar section to the tag cloud called “Topics I like”…I really don’t know what this is.
Actually this may list the tags for the posts I click on the title or rate positive, as it assumes I like these posts.

Recap…

This feature is amazing, just say I wanted to publish a post about YouTube-Google, but it is a week later and I want to recall those posts in my RSS Reader, well just search for the tag “YouTube”, and there appears all your posts about YouTube. The posts about YouTube-Google will have a few clusters, the posts about the rumour a few days earlier will be clustered, and just general posts about YouTube will also appear.

Others:
WizAg
MyFeedz
TagCloud
Zoom Clouds
Personal Bee
(Most of these are not personal/traditional RSS Readers)

In all Feeds 2.0 is a hot RSS Reader, I can’t wait till it is faster and primed for the big time.

Related:
Rojo: functionality and attention data
RSS Reading: recommendations
OPML Sampler: popular posts within an OPML
RSS Reading different views
Megite: personal OPML meme tracker
Personal meme readers
Feeds.Reddit and more on relevancy
RSS reading by relevance opml memetracking