The (Filtered) Web is Your Feed

A few months ago I was complaining here about my rss overload. A commenter suggested that I take a look at my6sense, a browser extension (now also iPhone app) that acts as a smart RSS reader, emphasizing the entries you should be reading. I wanted to give my6sense a go then, but the technical experience was lousy, and moreover – I was expected to migrate my rss reading to it. Too much of a hassle, I gave it up.

In the past few weeks I’ve been test-driving a new player – Genieo, which takes the basic my6sense idea a few steps further. Genieo installs an actual application, not just extension, that plugs into your browser. It tracks your rss feeds automatically, simply by looking for rss feeds in the pages you’re browsing, and learns your feeds without any setup work.

Genieo then goes further to discover feeds on pages you visit even if you’re not subscribed to them, turning your entire browsing history into one big rss feed.  It finally filters this massive pool of content using a semantic profile it builds for your interests, based on analyzing the text you’ve read so far.

For IR people this may sound a lot like Watson, Jay Budzik’s academic project turned contextual search turned an advertising technology acquisition. Watson approached this problem as a search problem: how would I formulate search queries that would run in the background, fetching me the most relevant documents that match the user’s current context? problem is, users are not constantly searching, and would get quickly annoyed by showing general search results when not asked for.

The good thing about an rss feed is that it explicitly says “this is a list of content items to be consumed from this source“, and its temporal nature provides a natural preference ranking (prefer recent items), so a heuristic of “users would be interested in recent and relevant items from feeds in pages they visited” works around the general search difficulty pretty well. Genieo circumvents the expected privacy outcry by running the entire logic on the client side, nothing of the analyzed data leaves your PC (privacy warriors would probably run sniffers to validate that).

In my personal experience, the quality of most results is excellent, and they are almost always posts that would interest me. Genieo quickly picked up my feed subscriptions from clicks I made in my reader to the full article in a browser window (from which it extracted the rss feed), and after a while I could see it gradually picking up on my favorite memes (search, social and others). I did not give up my rss reader for Genieo yet, and I also still have many little annoyances with it, but overall for an initial version, it works surprisingly well.

However, the target audience that is even more suited for Genieo is the not rss-savvy users like me, but the masses out there who don’t know and don’t care about reading feeds. They just want interesting news, and they don’t mind missing on the full list (a-la Dave Winer’s “River of News” concept). Such users will find tools like Genieo as useful as a personal news valet can be.