laterstars blog

rss, you’re dead to me - the laterstars manifesto, pt. 2

In part 1, I went over all the ways I’ve tried to stay on top of the glut of information available to us all by RSS, and how nothing has ever really worked for me. If you haven’t read it, the basic gist is that while there are plenty of tools available to try to rein it all in, from GReader and NetNewsWire for initial collection and reading of all the feeds, to delicious, Pinboard and Instapaper for managing all the stuff from those feeds that you actually care about, I always just ended up using a combination of all of them, spreading everything out to multiple black holes where most things would never be seen again. At the end of part 1, I promised to talk about why laterstars was started, the thought behind how it works, and why I think it will finally be the tool that will help me get everything under control. I was hoping to fit all that into just one more post, but it ended up way too long, so there will be one more tomorrow… this installment is going to be a bit of a higher level discussion of what I think the root of the problem is. The title of the series should give you a clue.

RSS

So let’s get right to the point. RSS. As a technology it’s perfectly fine, awesome even, and it’s enabled an unprecedented disbursement of information to tons of people over the years. The problem I see, however, is that in the RSS model the publishers push absolutely everything they want you to look at right into your inbox. And, of course, every publisher thinks they’re putting out the most important and interesting content out there. Like that hellish semester in college where every professor acts like their class is the only one you have, they think your only concern should reading every single thing they publish. It’s completely understandable, it gets them page views, popularity, and revenue. The simple fact, though, is that not everything in your RSS reader is going to be interesting. Not even close.

A while back, Chris Wanstrath of GitHub fame gave the keynote talk at the Ruby Hoedown. A large portion of his talk focused on his belief that everyone should have some side projects to work on, and he noted the tendency for people to immediately give the excuse of not having enough time in the day to work on them when challenged to do so. A major part of Chris’s advice for overcoming that roadblock? Quit messing around with RSS and just let other people filter out the good stuff for you:

First off, the time issue. I don’t know how many of you read RSS, but I challenge you (that’s a keynote term) to give it up for a month. Just turn it off. Stop using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever the kids are using these days. It’s not worth your time.

What should you do instead? If you use Twitter, try following the authors of your favorite blogs. Read their tweets on the bus. Or in the bathroom. Check Ruby Inside once a week and skim over the posts. Visit an aggregator like planetrubyonrails.com once a month. But mainly, let other people do the filtering for you. Use your time for other things.

You will not miss out on anything big. Stuff like the Google App Engine, or Rubinius running Rails, or the killer speaker line up at this year’s Ruby Hoedown will find its way to you. How can it not? I’m willing to bet a lot of the stuff in your RSS reader is stuff you already knew, or heard about somewhere else.

Personally, I used to check RSS multiple times per day. Now I don’t use any reader, and haven’t since January 2008.

When I first read this i thought it made perfect sense… why have the RSS firehose pointed at me every freakin’ day, leaving me to wade through hundreds (if not thousands) of posts only to find a few here and there that were actually worthwhile? Sure, apps like GReader try to do fancy statistical tricks to try recommending things to you, and even have “magic” sorting and all that… but when it comes down to it, are you really going to rely on that type of stuff more than the recommendations of humans you respect and trust?

Humans make great editors of information. This is why sites like Reddit, Digg, Hacker News, and Slashdot, have all done really well. They enable you to take the shortcut of just going to them to see what the latest cool links are. Slashdot of course has the concept of trusted editors who make the decisions of what gets published, while Digg, Reddit, and HN take the “wisdom of the crowds” approach, allowing anyone with an account to submit links and having everyone else vote on what’s the cream that should rise to the top. Works fairly well. The problem I see with these approaches, though, is that you don’t get to choose who the editors are. On Slashdot people earn the right to publish over time, which is cool and all, but I don’t personally know anyone who has ever wielded that power, do you? If you do, then, well… congrats? As for the other sites, it should actually be “wisdumb of the crowds” amirite? I mean, have you seen some of the crap that makes the front page of Digg these days?

Twitter

This, of course, is where Twitter comes in. You already follow a bunch of people because you think they’re either funny, smart, or a consistently good source of information. And they in turn continually return the favor by dropping little nuggets of wisdom and humor throughout the day, sometimes in the form of links to kickass stuff. If they don’t, you stop following them. Like Chris said, this is the stuff you should care about. It’s already been filtered by someone you trust who’s taken the time to vet its worth for you. It’s a very Tim Ferriss type of thing, outsourcing your link gathering like this, but it makes sense. Your time is worth way more when it’s put toward doing useful things like actually creating stuff instead of poring over freakin’ Google Reader for hours every day. Sure, you may follow way too many people on Twitter and it’s a time sink in itself, but let’s be honest with ourselves… you’re going to look at your Twitter stream every 5 minutes no matter what, no matter where you are. Might as well make it a bit useful, right? And if it’s still too overwhelming, just set up some lists of people who usually link to good stuff and make those the ones you actually make a point to scan.

Ok, awesome, now that I’m gonna get all my links pre-filtered by all my Twitter buddies I’ll have enough time left over to build the next… Twitter. But wait, I’m expected to read all those links as I go through my Twitter stream?! That’s not going to work. If I’m popping over to Tweetie or Echofon or whatever every 5 or 10 minutes as a nervous diversion, there’s no way I’m going to be able to check out multiple links every single time, especially on an iPhone. Sure you can load up a crapton of tabs in the background to come back to later, but managing that is a pain in the ass and somewhat volatile. And yeah, you can load and read full web pages on an iPhone, but man, it’s definitely not the fastest thing around. Besides, if I’m at work popping over to Twitter every few minutes and then opening up the articles to read right then, that’s not going to end very well.

And then we’re right back to where we started - what to do with these all these links. At least we’ve made some progress… Google Reader is out of the picture and Twitter is providing us with a much more focused and filtered set of links to work with… but absolutely no way to manage them. That brings us back to our old friends delicious/Pinboard, Instapaper/ReadItLater, etc. Maybe they’ll work better with the Twitter stuff? Not so fast. First off, they require integration. I know, pretty much every Twitter app out there sports Instapaper integration now, so that’s great. Delicious has made some headway too, but is definitely not as well represented in the Twitter app universe as Instapaper. I’m starting to see Pinboard and ReadItLater support too, but they’re in a pretty distant third in this regard.

So Instapaper and delicious it is. I’ll use Instapaper for saving long articles I want to read later, and delicious for saving the other random links. Support is pretty good in Tweetie for Instapaper, but I’m not sure if it supports delicious… hmm, looks like it doesn’t. Ok, then I’ll throw absolutely everything I’m interested in checking out later into Instapaper. That puts me back in the situation of having a ton of stuff I don’t think makes sense stored within Instapaper, like links to photos and videos, and I still have all the problems I talked about in part 1 with actually managing all those things within their interface. Sorry, not really something I’m interested in doing.

Now What?

So by now I’ve roundly dismissed good ol’ RSS, all the existing popular tools for working with RSS, and every bookmark management and read-it-later solution out there. I’ve decided that Twitter is the best source for getting links, but that they don’t provide anything to manage them, and the existing tools still won’t work. So what’s the answer? Build something myself, of course.

Next post will finish this whole thing up… the thinking that went into the design of how laterstars works, and why I think it’s the solution to my problems. Until then, let me know what you think.