RSS Life Hacks

If you are anything like me, RSS feeds are a constant part of your daily life. I use them for a variety of things from finding news for work to tracking my own and others' writing online. I even have my daily agenda and television shows in RSS feeds to remind me of various tasks and alert me to new shows. RSS applications have been cropping up everywhere lately as more and more people are using them for more than just reading articles from Fark.

There are a variety of Web 2.0 developers now capitalizing on the popularity of RSS as a daily life tool. You can get almost everything in an RSS style format, after all, so why not bank on that? Several web companies are already changing the way feeds are read, used and enhanced. We already talked about a couple of them, like Orangutag's RSS for television, Particls feed reader, various life streaming programs and more.

There are hundreds of RSS based Web 2.0 applications, but these few recently caught our eye. Some we liked, some we thought needed improvement to be a viable option. In no particular order:

FeedCrier: FeedCrier attempts to do something I've wanted for a while - aggregate RSS and Atom feeds into your instant message service. I love Adium and Trillian because they are one of several programs that allow users like me with several instant message accounts to see all of them at once. I've been longing for a way to add Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, RSS and Atom into the window as well. This is a step in the right direction, bring my news to my IM client.

FeedCrier has one major stumbling block, however (there is always a catch). You currently have to add the feeds you wish to subscribe to one at a time. For someone like me who has been using RSS for so long, adding nearly 500 or more individual feeds to a web site interface one at a time isn't appealing. Neither is the toolbar button they offer, which still limits you to one site at a time. Frankly, I don't need any more toolbar buttons - I have too many already.

FeedCrier also limits you to two and a half message services. it is fully compatible with the horrid AOL instant message service, and with GTalk/Jabber. MSN's instant message service is in beta compatibility right now. This means that your choices are limited as to where you will see the RSS message feed appear. There also seems to be no way to prioritize feeds or results. A way to sort the feeds would be helpful.

RSSMeme: This is a simple little web site that tracks feeds across the internet by meme, or popularity. You can visit the site and see the day's RSS and Atom feeds ranked by popularity and topic. They also offer a feed of the page itself so that you can view their results in your RSS reader instead of having to go to the page for updates. Each feed is shows a snippet of the article so that you can better see what people are liking that day.

RSSMeme also gives you a way to show your love for a story by placing a share option next to the title. If you like a story and share it, the story moves up in popularity. You can track the days' results on the statistics page. You can also view feeds sorted by popular, this week and recent.

FilterMyRSS: FilterMyRSS is a handy tool for people who want to follow a feed but find much of the information in it doesn't apply to them. For example, celebrity bloggers could use this on feeds like TMZ that update often and treat everything as news, no matter how small. The celebrity blogger doesn't need to know that Lindsay Lohan crossed the street, or Britney Spears woke up, but they do want to know when someone has a meltdown or does something truly noteworthy.

The main drawback of FilterMyRss is that it is bound to the web site. For example, filtering CNN for news on Obama narrowed my results to help write an article on politics. I would have loved to find a way to create a new feed for my reader that filtered the feed for Obama since I plan to write a series of articles on him. Unfortunately, I'll have to get out of my feed reader and reenter the feed url each time I want to see a feed's filtered results. Creating new feed urls to put in a reader to auto filter results would be a huge step for this application. Also figuring out what causes the all to frequent error message that an RSS feed url is invalid (gotten even on such heavy hitting sites like CNN) and fixing it would be beneficial.

These programs are only the tip of the iceberg in RSS feed applications. There are new ways to use your RSS feed every day. If you use Google Calendar, you can get your agenda in the form of an XML feed by going into the Share This Calendar menu and clicking the XML button. If you use an event site like Upcoming, you can crab a feed of events in your area and be reminded of events on your list (handily, Upcoming also integrates into Google Calendar). No matter what you do online, chances are there is a way to grab it for a feed. How do you use RSS?