RSS – Not a recipe for boredom

Robert Scoble wrote an article earlier today about how he is bored with the discussions around RSS. Basically, RSS is not real time, and Twitter offers the best access to news and information.  I am being very loose with the summary, but it’s really just best to read his short article if you want to get his meaning.

He ends by asking “What about you? Is RSS interesting or boring to you? Why?”.  This struck me immediately as I have been spending more and more time on Google Reader recently reading RSS,. and I figured I should write up a response.  I should say that I fit somewhere in-between a news hound like Robert or Louis and what I would call a casual RSS user (someone who adds a feed to their My Yahoo page for example).

I wanted to make just two points to answer his question.  I find RSS to still be quite exciting.  This is in part due to the social aspects of Google Reader that have been brought online recently, and in part due to new and better filters which are available.

The first point I want to make is that while Twitter is a great way to get the most recent information, but it is just a big black hole.  If you have the time to watch everything getting sucked into the void you can derive a lot of value, but once the tweets have passed into the void beyond they are gone.  One of the first things I do in the morning is check in with the Twitter trending topics.  This morning I saw that Senator Kennedy had died.  Trending topics can be a great Twitter filter.  This news was not in my paper, nor was it in Google Reader yet, making Twitter’s speed a benefit in this regard.  I filter Twitter by following a number of topics via searches, and I read the filtered content through RSS and Google Reader.  I am basically putting a video camera right in front of the black hole which is recording everything on a particular subject that goes in.  I don’t need to read all of those items, but I have them captured should I need them.  I agree with Robert that Twitter is important, and I agree that filters are important (even better filters than we have now), but it is the ability to grab that filtered Twitter content as RSS that makes Twitter really useful to me.

Secondly, I have to ask where is all of the great content in Twitter is coming from if not RSS?  Isn’t it PubSubHubBub and RSS feeding these new post from the blogs into Twitter and FriendFeed super fast?  Even the articles that feed into Twitter a little slower are often coming from people who are monitoring various news and blog sources (through an RSS reader).  In my mind, RSS is not boring because it is the root of getting this information distributed.  I love hearing about new advances in getting information into RSS faster.

Robert is right though, filtering is super important.  This is why I am finding the new social features in Google Reader nice.  I am able to look very quickly at articles for shares and likes to see how popular articles are.  I can sort articles by comments which can be helpful as well.  The filters are not perfect yet, but better than they were.  Filtering and search functionality will continue to improve and I will continue to take advantage of those in my feed reader.

The New RSS – Follow people not sites

Thanks in part to the announcement by FriendFeed that they are being acquired by Facebook, the recently added social features (and here as well) of Google Reader have really taken off over the past week.  Google Reader has become a place to not only read RSS feeds, but to have discussions on the best articles (replacing FriendFeed? only time will tell).

For me, one of the best parts of this new found interest in Google Reader and sharing is that all of the 40+ people I am now following are sharing the best articles they read with me.  Instead of having to cull through 600+ feeds, I can make do with the 120 or so that I really care about and let all of the people I am following do the rest of the work for me.  I am still following sites via RSS, but this new crop of people I am following is where the real value is on Google Reader.  For example, I don’t actively follow or read TechCrunch (for various reasons) but I know that many of the people I am following do.  I am able to track the most important articles from TechCrunch in this way.

The ability to share items in Reader is not a new one, nor is the option to comment on them.  The Reader team has recently added the ability to like articles though.  These social features all came together recently when Google changed the way you can search for and subscribe to other people.  Leveraging Google Profiles, you can search for people who use Reader and have shared items.  This makes the feature so much more usable, as I don’t have to ask people for their email address.  The whole thing integrates with Google Contacts, which is nice if you already use Google Contacts, and works by simply adding the people you follow to groups.  Once they are in a group you can allow the group to comment on your items.  This is a critical step as it is what opens up to social side of Google Reader.  While this method is a bit tricky for people, and not terribly intuitive, it is nice that the default option is to keep things private.  I like having control over what I share.

Confused by how this works?  You can take a look at the image on the pingmicro site which attempts to explain it.  I am planning to record a short video in the next couple of days that walks through how this all comes together.

You can find me on Google Reader (like everywhere else) by searching for seanabrady.