When Do I Get a Personalizable Techmeme?
“History repeats itself,” goes the saying. “And historians repeat each other,” continue the wags. I just repeat myself. In November 2005 I was already blogging about the wonders of Techmeme (then Tech Memeorandum) and how the rise of aggregated news sites was leading me to unsubscribe from a growing number of RSS feeds.
Nearly a year and a half later, nothing much has changed. I still find probably 90% of the articles that I read on Techmeme, with a smattering on Google News (which I only seem to visit nowadays to find golf articles) and the rest in the tiny number of feeds I still subscribe to (mostly Planet Mozilla). Just now I spontaneously exclaimed to Cedric that if I were to start a new startup today and it couldn’t be AllPeers, I would focus on developing a customizable news aggregator. I know this has been tried before, but I still haven’t seen anything truly useful come out of these efforts. It’s a hard problem, but not nearly as hard as making a search engine that understands natural language queries, something some people seem to think is around the corner.
To reiterate: I want something that gives me the best of Techmeme and Google News, tailored to my tastes as identified by my RSS feeds, the pages I visit and the links on the aforementioned sites that I click on most. In addition, it should add posts from my feeds that exceed some algorithmic threshold, as well as pages that people like me have looked at. Initial setup has to be dead simple and provide instant results. Ideally I just upload my OPML file, tell it which aggregation sites I like most and it would spit out an already-pretty-good Techmeme style page, personalized to my tastes.
I hereby predict that the first usable offering of this type will appear over the next twelve months. Please indulge me by forgetting I ever predicted this if it doesn’t happen (and rest assured, I’ll be sure to brag about my prescience if I happen to get this one right).
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So…I predict it won’t appear in the next year.
Comment by Gabe — 2/27/2007 @ 9:50 pm
Party pooper!
Comment by Matt — 2/28/2007 @ 2:19 pm
Thats funny, as I’ve gone off bigger sites almost completely, during roughly the same time-frame
I used to read Heise News daily, /. regularly and so on. Now I almost never do anymore. Instead, I almost exclusively read single-person feeds, with a few from research labs and magazines thrown in.
I guess I can do so because I deliberately ignore most high-tech trends. There’s so many of them, I don’t really care and if something important comes along, it will bubble up in one of the personal feeds.
The personal feeds I read are mostly for keeping track of very specific things I’m interested in, such as machine learning stuff (e.g. John Langford), new media research (e.g. danah boyd) and mobile software/image processing.
My conjecture would be that our different reading habits reflect different jobs
Comment by Ingo — 3/1/2007 @ 4:58 pm
yahoo pipes anyone?
Just get techmeme and google news (filter only golf or whatnot) and whatever else you like and your done ^^.oO( customize away… )
Comment by fiend — 3/10/2007 @ 12:39 am