Dealing With RSS Is Too Hard
By Nick | September 19th, 2009
Lazyfeed Screenshot
Reading the news efficiently can feel like a full-time job. If you choose to get your news through an RSS reader, Twitter, or one of the hundred other news aggregators, you are inundated with more information than you can process, about a wide variety of subjects you never asked to be told about. There are tools and techniques to cut down on this information overload, but it all amounts to more work: maintaining groups of feeds, cutting out spammy sources, and extensively using keyword search. That is intimidating to all but the most “hardcore” of users.
Lazyfeed is an attempt to remove the work involved in getting your news, without having to rely on a single source. With Lazyfeed, you just enter some terms that interest you and it will create constantly updating streams of news about those topics. You don’t have to deal with URLs, or picking through masses of content, Lazyfeed just sorts it out for you. It’s very quick to set up an account, although it would be nice if it came with a ‘guest mode’ that required no setup at all.
Now, Lazyfeed at present is probably a better idea than it is a product. The algorithm, for whatever reason, seems to prefer very obscure (and sometimes poor) blogs for many popular topics. This leaves the results often lacking. This will hopefully improve over time, but is currently hampering the usefulness of the product. Rest assured, if Lazyfeed doesn’t fix this problem there are others with similar products who will: feedly, Newsvine, and Techmeme are a few that come to mind.
What Lazyfeed does provide is a window into the future of news. When a service with this level of simplicity, and the right algorithm for surfacing the top stories, comes along: it will catch on in a big way. Lazyfeed will even read through your blog/Twitter (or someone else’s) to pick up new keywords to follow.
In other promising news, Lazyfeed now supports PubSubHubbub (an implementation of the Webhooks we were talking about a few weeks ago) and RSSCloud (a competing real-time delivery system).
Have a custom web application you need built? Contact Thirdi today!
Related posts:
Tags: Aggregator, Blog, lazyfeed, rss
