Junecloud

Junk mail filters have become a standard feature for email applications. RSS readers are a bit different—you have complete control over the feeds you subscribe to, so it seems logical that there’s just no need to filter the data. But I’m not convinced.

I subscribe to quite a few feeds. At the moment, 112 of them. I have 3905 unread items, and that’s a nightmare to deal with. I don’t want to stop subscribing to any of them… They all have things I want to read on occasion. But the problem is, there’s a lot of noise.

Ideally I would like to be able to mark things based on my level of interest, from “very interested” to “not interested at all”. Perhaps a star rating system (1 to 5) would be appropriate, but even two settings of “junk” and “not junk” would be a great start. From there the software could behave just like any other intelligent filter: it takes my ratings, analyzes the text, and does its best to determine what I like to read about. From there it would take a guess at rating each new item.

With this, suddenly my news feeds are much easier to deal with. I can look at one- and two-star items very quickly, just skimming the headlines, or I can set them to not show up at all. If I don’t have a lot of time I can just look at the five-star items. And so on.

It’s possible there’s a news reader that does this already, but I’ve never heard of such a thing. I imagine I’m not the first to think of it though, so hopefully we’ll see one soon. I’ve got my money on NetNewsWire.

Update: NetNewsWire can now sort feeds by attention. Not quite what I’m after, but it’s absolutely a step in the right direction, and developer Brent Simmons notes that “filtering is definitely on the feature requests list”. Can’t wait!