What men and everyone else want

I’m trying to remember when I first started using an RSS reader. It must have been a long time ago. What made it wonderful was that I didn’t have to trawl all my favorite sites looking for anything new. At first it saved me a lot of time, but eventually my Google Reader account became an information dump. That didn’t happen overnight, and maybe it happened to you too. You gradually add interesting sources to the reader, but the more you have, the less time you have to pick out what’s really interesting.

Unread headlines pile up, and Twitter comes along and pushes the RSS reader aside. A year ago Twitter became my main source of information. It works a little differently. Its main purpose isn’t merely to aggregate headlines. The advantage is that the people you follow filter the material for you and pass on the more relevant links. Of course, Twitter eventually starts to suffer from the same problem as an RSS reader, right when you reach a critical number of people you follow (50 in my case).

What I’m missing is a tool or service that looks at everything I read on my computer in any electronic form, then serves me a set number of the most relevant articles each day. Ideally I could choose the number. In my case, I’d want no more than three to five.

It would need to factor in how recent the information is, what’s gaining attention, and so on. Suppose 40 percent of my Google searches are about Java, InfoQ is a favorite of mine, and an excellent article on Java appears there and is quickly retweeted by lots of people I follow directly or indirectly. I’d expect a tool that smart to catch the article in its net and put it in my daily selection. I don’t think that’s a fantasy. Maybe a tool like that already exists. Maybe someone is working away on it in a Google lab. We’ll see. I’d certainly pay for something like it.