It seems that there is a lot of activity around RSS lately (does that answer the “will RSS ever go big?” question?). I am interested in this subject, because I use RSS a lot (here are some stats from recently released trends feature in Google Reader) and because I was involved in development of RSS reader – a project dear to me, and frozen to death at the moment, but with plenty of hopes on my side to unfreeze it one day.
One of the major challanges, when creating RSS reader, is trying to solve the “information overload” problem. There are a number of ways to ago about, and none of those that I saw worked well enough. In our RSS reader we used something very simple, based on the user’s reading habbits – feed access counts, items read counts, items bookmarked and followed counts – all measured against feed activity.
Today I came across some excellent thinking at Ilya Grigorik’s blog – part 1 and part 2. There was also a link to RSS habbits study by Microsoft.
Something tells me that RSS readers will change a lot in the next few years…