NewsGator RSS Readers to help you find the "Right Stuff"

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

NewsGator RSS Readers to help you find the "Right Stuff"

by Drew Olanoff May 22nd 2008

How many of you subscribe to an RSS feed because you liked one post you read? Raise your hands please. No, seriously, raise your hands please. Now how many of you stay subscribed to that feed because you're either too lazy to unsubscribe, don't know how to unsubscribe, or don't want to hurt the bloggers' feelings by unsubscribing? Us too.

NewsGator is coming to our rescue!

Starting today, NewsGator, NetNewsWire, and FeedDemon will start recommending stories and feeds for you to read and subscribe to.

Using some Harry Potter magic sauce from a company called SenseArray, NewsGator will start showing you suggestions based on things that other people think are interesting. Hooray!

What's the catch? Well, to make this technology smarter, you'll have to interact with your feeds a little. That's OK. We know that the earth isn't run by ~~Terminators~~ machines...yet. Right now, SenseArray's technology uses forward and share numbers, as well as tags and comment data to calculate what might interest you. You'll be able to thumbs up and thumbs down stories to customize the experience though, so no worries. Rage against the machine, y'all!

Soon, NewsGator hopes to accurately predict your tastes, even before you know what your tastes are.

It looks like the company is also hoping to help us deal with our severe information overload (the 3% of us junkies) by letting us unsubscribe to those dormant feeds that we don't like anymore and keep us up to date with the Right Stuff. The stuff we'll actually, you know...read?

Oh, and no worries, it's not just for the geeks. Their new recommendation service will cover Top News, Entertainment, Sports, Fun Stuff, Science and Technology. While we're not sure what "Fun Stuff" actually is, we'll wait for T2 to suggest something.

Oh and please feel free to subscribe to the Downloadsquad feed. We're humans.

Tags: feeddemon, netnewswire, newsgator, rss, rssreader

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

dpcfmander said 6:03PM on 5-22-2008

I doubt anybody cares, but in the blog post, there's a duplicate word, "showing", in the sentence

"Using some Harry Potter magic sauce from a company called SenseArray, NewsGator will start showing showing you suggestions based on things that other people think are interesting."

Thanks.

Drew Olanoff said 8:04AM on 5-23-2008

We care :) Fixed.

Thank you!

Flamingo said 1:55PM on 5-31-2008

A service called 'outbrain' is already doing this.
http://www.outbrain.com/
And rather than thumbs up/down it has a 5 star system -good stuff :)

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