If you’re like me, you have a few dozen RSS feeds listed in your reader. But you probably also rarely have time to review them all, especially when the stack is 1,000+ posts deep.Finally, a few services have popped up that allow you to maintain your exhaustive RSS feeds, but filters them for you based on relevancy. Net result – less crap and more of the good stuff.
AideRSS and FeedHub both take very different approaches to managing RSS overload. AideRSS looks to the community for inspiration, filtering posts by popularity. FeedHub starts with classifications or “memes” to group and filter your posts, allowing you to weight the value of each meme, learning your preferences over time.
While both allow some degree of personalization, FeedHub is clearly more “personal”. With AideRSS, you can weight each feed based on its overall importance to you. With FeedHub you weight each meme the feed belongs in, but also vote on the value of each post – thumbs up or thumbs down.
I suspect in the short term AideRSS probably drives the best relevancy, being able to start immediately relevancy scoring based on the community of readers. But I think FeedHub will be more relevant to me in the long term, as I score each post and system learns from me. FeedHub’s analysis is more granular, at the post level, whereas AideRSS is looking at the feed.
Both are quite easy to setup – you import your RSS feed list. Then a new RSS feed URL is generated which you add to your favorite reader, simply managing the filtered feeds like any other feed.
I’ve been using these for a few weeks now, and its simply too early to tell which is better. I may be missing some golden nuggets along the way, but paring thousands of posts down to a few hundred makes the task of reading that much more enjoyable.
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