WatTF? - Jim Murphy

The fine folks at AideRSS have made their GoogleReader integration available today. Its no hoax - the real deal. I’ve been running versions over the last month or so and its changed the way I manage my ~300 (and growing) feeds.

Here’s to our evolution to better subscription management!

1. In the beginning, I would subscribe willy-nilly to feeds, like I was hoarding streams of Internet knowledge, kind of like Diggs or De.licio.us links often with the same filter.  It didn’t take long before I accumulated significant attention debt and would feel increasingly inadequate when I’d get through less and less of my subscriptions each day. Like any addict, this didn’t change my desire to hoard feeds continuing at 5-10 / week.

2. Eventually I bucketed my feeds in 2 categories, not wanting to go overboard building some contrived hierarchy of folders or tagging system that I’d never use. So bucket #1 was called Favorites and bucket #2 was called Monitor. I’d try to keep up on all posts in my Favorites bucket and just sorta hunt and peck through the Monitor bucket. It took about a week before I never looked in the Monitor bucket and my Favorites was my new tape worm of time.

Coincidentally (or not), Jeff Fedor mentioned that AideRSS might help “Read what matters“. That appealed to me for obvious reasons. I started using the AideRSS service to process feeds for many of the subscriptions I was Monitoring. It was pretty intriguing and once I had some feeds pared down and wired up in my reader I felt on top of things. But it took a few too many clicks to keep up with - so new unfiltered feeds started to creep in.

3. Enter the AideRSS Google Reader Extension. Available today is a customization of GoogleReader done inside your FireFox browser, the AideRSS FireFox addin brings the filtering of feeds directly inside the GoogleReader experience, simplifying reading and managing feeds. So now you subscribe to feeds then dial in the filter to go from all posts to good, great or just the best. This can cut a feed volume down by an order of magnitude.

Heres a screen shot of the filtering in action:

You can install the extension at http://gr.aiderss.com/

Congrats guys - nice job!