Web 2.0 and Me!

A few months back I wrote a post describing my perception of Web 2.0. Today I have been really impressed as to where the web is heading, which also serves as the motivation of writing this post.

I have this large list of RSS feeds that I read in Google Reader. But the problem is that I don’t have enough time to read all the posts and also it happens that some of the feeds share common content.So I always desired something which could monitor my reading habits and then present rank list unread feeds, with feeds that are most relevant to me appearing at the top. This way I could save time, which was previously being wasted in discarding the unimportant feeds. Also if could detect duplicate content replicated among N unread feeds and then cluster them, it would save more time.

Feeds 2.0 seems to be the solution to the problem. It learns your preferences as you use it and then presents the more relevant posts first. I have applied for the private Beta Login and am yet to use it. But what I can get from the Screencasts is that it learns the tags of the posts that you read(or say mark important) and builds up a list of your preferred tags. This list builing is a continuous process. To decide relevancy of posts, it tries to find out to which extent, the post to be ranked, can be classifed by the tags in your preferred list. This seems to be a good idea and is as simple as building up my interest areas.

However I have one concern. It often happens that we always read a post published by a person X, disregard of the topic of the post. For example, I always like to read my friend’s blog, no matter whats he writes. Thus I have a preference towards by friend’s blog not because he writes on a particular topic but because he is my friend. These kinds of relations cannot be captured by a simple list of preferred interests. To capture these relationships the following ideas might be useful:

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• The application should monitor the order in which I prefer to read the posts. For example, whenever I see a unread post written by my friend X, then my first reaction is to read this post ahead of others.
• If somehow the application can build a preference list that not only says the topics I am interested in but also the bloggers I am interested in, then the performance can really improve.
  

Feeds 2.0 also clusters similar posts and presents them in a related fashion. Man it seems that these people read my mind. Now please be more considerate and grant me login.

Some related posts:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/rss-beast.html

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/first_look_aiderss_feed_filtering.php

 UPDATE: It seems my initial impression about how Feeds 2.0 might work was too elementary. Check out the first comment for more details. 

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Also people who know me would be wondering why the change of blogs. The reason is that WordPress rocks and Blogger lacks a lot of features.

• The best thing about WordPress is that it allows me to lock individual posts via passwords. It means I can write personal posts on the same blog and lock them so that only I can read them. Also according to the FAQ section, no RSS feeds are published for the password locked feeds. Awesome! . Simply Awesome. See its web 2.0 times,
  
• Also WordPress has got a very good list of blog templates.
• I am sure I will discover more as I use it more.