The Sopranos is a story about a man that happens to be set in the world of organized crime. The Wire is a story about a setting, Baltimore, that happens to include a story about some people. They just so happen to be there so we learn a little about their lives, but the the real story is that of the city. This distinction is what makes The Sopranos one of the biggest shows of the last 20 years, and it makes The Wire a show with a small but vocal crowd who think it may be the best TV show ever made. Oddly, this comparison also illustrates why feed readers aren’t used by as many people as they could be.

These two shows are both critically acclaimed, but The Sopranos has objectively won more honors. I don’t think this was because The Sopranos was objectively better, though. I think it comes down to context, the network of stories in a long drawn out series and how they are connected in their respective worlds.

In The Sopranos, the stories are all closely connected through Tony. Everything could be understood through his perspective. On the other hand, the narrative of The Wire is solely connected through the city.

The way in which The Wire is written could create a problem for a casual viewer. First, you would need to understand the premise. If slow-paced stories set in a rundown city isn’t your cup of tea, it might require a lot of time before you start to see that each thread plays apart in a larger story about Baltimore.

The second problem is that a viewer needs to keep a running context of everything that has happened. The history of the show is sometimes the only way some stories mean anything.

The Sopranos is not a simple show, or any less deserving of its accolades, but it is easier to watch. I have read more than one blog post opining about why The Wire didn’t get a single Emmy. I think the simplest reason might be that it was just a difficult show to watch, and therefore fewer people watched it, but what made it difficult also made it so rich and pleasing to those who did watch it.

Now, here is the pivot. Comparing The Sopranos to The Wire could be like comparing a straightforward news diet of the daily paper, a few focused news sites, and possible one or two blogs, to that of a feed reader. For discussion purposes, let’s call the former a focused news diet, and the latter a diffuse news diet. The focused news diet is to The Sopranos as The Wire is to the diffuse news diet.

The focused news diet, like The Sopranos, has a strong central thread. Each website you visit there is a couple of editors who really put their stamp on things. They make sure that the site is dialed in basically the same way, day after day. If you read the same blogs everyday, even single-author blogs, you begin to understand how they tick. There isn’t much that surprises you or is orthogonal to the focused news diet. Also, like The Sopranos, the focused news diet is easy to consume. You don’t have to try very hard, and it becomes like a habit. Even if you wanted to consume more news, you couldn’t really, because the daily habit of opening all those webpages would become cumbersome if you tried to add in any more sites. Just like The Sopranos, you come away with a strong point of view from a few select sources.

Now compare that to the diffuse diet, the feed reading diet. The feed reading diet could easily include over 100 different news feeds that could be a mixture of professional, pro-am, and amateur alike. It could go further still and include feeds from aggregators that collect sources from all over the place. In this diet, there is no way any one editor will overpower another. You end up being your own editor. You must build a context for yourself. Like The Wire, this becomes the reward, understanding how stories relate to one another. Understand the underlying allegiances each site has to one another. By building that context yourself, each story means more and gets placed in a larger web of interest.

While The Sopranos will live on as a great show, it feels as if The Wire is beginning to ripen. The Wire will be a show that people discover slowly for a long time, and it’s possible more people will end up enjoying it long after it aired. David Simone said this himself recently at an interview in San Francisco: “I have a knack for making shows that people watch only after they have been on TV.”

Likewise, I think feed readers are an idea whose time is coming. We haven’t seen the best days of feed readers, and if we aren’t careful, we might not. But if there is a saving grace, it’s that people who use feed readers use them heavily and don’t want to lose them.

Last week multiple signs started to appear that point to the fact that Facebook might be prepping a news reader. While there has been discussion of the possibility few, if any, have tried to figure out what it would mean in general. Admittedly, there are few details, but it’s not that hard to extrapolate from past actions. You need to look at this from a couple different perspectives though. Why does this make sense for Facebook, Publishers, or the consumer? Finally, could it work?

First off, I think it makes sense for Facebook. If the newly public company had a list priorities growth and profits have to be at the top. With the street breathing down their neck they have entered new markets and cut out existing partners wherever there is even a little money to be made. One way to increase revenue is to increase page views, and thus ad views. So, the more they can get you to consume information on Facebook they better off they are.

It’s even a better idea when we look at mobile. The second birth of newsreaders is all due to mobile consumption. Reeder, Mr. Reader, Sunstroke all brought a second wind to a decaying product and extended it’s reach. If we throw Flibpoard, Google Currents, and other visual news readers the potential sherlocking gets even bigger. Think, what if Facebook has dedicated readers for the iPhone, and iPad, maybe Android? Built in social graph. The ability to cross promote the hell out of these apps. From Facebook’s perspective it keeps looking better.

This is where publishers come in. People already consume their content through the newsfeed via Facebook Pages, but this probably isn’t the best model for news content. Facebook might choose to create a new feed that consists only of news sources a user has chosen to subscribe to. They might even eliminate the blackbox algorithm on this feed and let users browse all the news they have subscribed too. They might even let users drill down to individual sources.

This makes sense to publishers for a couple of reasons. First, many news publishers already have RSS feeds of some kind, so it would be a very easy technical transition. Second, Facebook Pages are an okay way of doing engagement on Facebook, but I am sure that publishers would rather have a direct line to it’s users. This might loosen the path. Finally, Anyone who is paying attention to their subscriber base on Google Reader will realize that they are about to loose a giant slice of readers. If Facebook is actually proposing something close to a Google Reader replacement this might be an opportunity to salvage those readers.

Lets look at an example like Deadspin. They have 115k likes on their Facebook page. Which gives them a chance at reaching those subscribers every time they publish something to that page. Now we look at how many people subscribe to Deadspin on Google Reader; 221k.

Not only do they have almost twice the readers on Google Reader, each story is probably read more often then it is on Facebook.

Of course anything Facebook would do would have to include a bunch of big brand, upscale publishers, but I think its important to realize that even us little guys are looking at loosing a giant portion of readers.Even Marshall Kirkpatrick had this to say about a Facebook News Reader:

“Sure would be great for all the blog publishers of the world to gain access to even more readers on the FB platform!” — Kirkpatrick

If smaller publishers are anything like my self. We are talking about losing 99% of our readers¹. So, the whole spectrum of publishers could benefit from something like a Facebook News Reader that bootstraps off a closing Google Reader.

So, there are clear reasons why Facebook and Publishers would love this, what about consumers?

I have no idea. Facebook has shown that they can make good apps (Messanger) and they can get people to try new apps (Poke), even if they can get people to keep using them. There is no lack of news reading apps so, sure, I do think that if this is as broad reaching as app + web + feeds users could like it.

Sounds good, right? Well…

Look, whatever Facebook is it’s not a platform. This is 100% publishers beware. Letting Facebook hold the keys to your audience doesn’t seem like a great idea, but publishers might not have an option at this point. Consumers might get a nice product, but is this just another countdown to an eventual shutdown?

Whatever it is we will know more on the 20th.

Discovery is a pretty broad activity for one tool, but the idea is simple. Some cycles are inward, convergent paths, meaning you end up getting deeper and narrower into a topic over time. For certain topics, this isn’t always bad. Often you would go deeper on subjects that matter to you. In general though, you want to slowly move outwards. It’s a form of diversification. You don’t want your sources to stagnate, or you could end up missing out on a larger context. The path you want to be on is the divergent one, the outward spiral. Cast a wide net first, and then edit out what’s not worth it. Unfortunately, discovery is woefully under served as a category in feed readers.

You could look at how a service like Facebook does it. Facebook uses a black box algorithm to populate your newsfeed with stories it thinks you will find interesting. It uses some form of machine learning to figure out what you want to see. It works pretty well, but most likely it is convergent, meaning it won’t budge at all from what you have looked at previously. Not the end of the world, but it’s rarely if ever going to surprise you. Part of making sure that your feed won’t stagnate is making sure that you keep pushing outwards looking for more voices.

So, if we had a discovery tool for feed readers, it should help with a few common cases: following sources, people, and possibly tags. The first two sources and people are easier to do now. Often sources will have firehose feeds for everything they publish, and if you really enjoy that source, it’s a good idea to subscribe. I really like The Awl, so I subscribe to a feed that has all their stories, regardless of who wrote them. On the other hand, I don’t always want to read all the stories that come from Wired, but I do want to know what Mat Honan is writing about. In that case, I will subscribe to just his author feed. In both cases, it requires a ton of manual labour to go find those feeds for individuals. It would be much more awesome if I had a tool that could aggregate stuff like this for me.

I call this tastestalking. You, for whatever reason, enjoy someone’s taste, and want to just follow what they have to say. In many cases, I found that people produce great content across many sites; Twitter, Del.icio.us, and Pinboard are just a few. If you end up following those people in many places, you can get a fuller picture of what and how they are thinking about certain topics, which in turn help inform your own thinking.

Another reason for discovery is so your feed is never empty. The best way to combat this is to follow people. Just follow anyone, seriously, anyone referenced in anything that is currently in your stream. The fact that someone you already read is choosing to mention another person is a positive signal.

You are also running up against a natural decay of feeds to which you did subscribe. People stop writing, they have major life events, their companies fold. There are a ton of reasons why feeds stop being published, so you should always be subscribing at a slightly faster rate then the old feeds are decaying.

And finally, edit. If a feed just isn’t cutting it anymore, kill it.

Juxtaposition is a technique that gets used quite often without anyone noticing. It gets used and misused daily by the media to great effect. To understand the power of juxtaposition I think it helps to talk about the Kuleshov Effect:

“Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mosjoukine’s face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was “looking at” the plate of soup, the girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief or desire, respectively.”

The mere act of putting two objects next to one another causes the brain to create a connection between them. This technique can be used to synthesize ideas that aren’t actually represented in the frame.

It can even play a role in the daily rhythm of reading feeds. Just like film, feed readers are splicing together many different streams of information. In film, it’s a series of images, and in feeds, it’s a series of posts, but its the same principle. You benefit from the ability to organize your feeds into folders and then consume them as a group. That way, your brain can make connections between the posts. Luckily, feed readers are flexible enough to mix together streams like this, but it’s only one form of flexibility.

Flexibility is the basic tenet of a feed reader. It lets us get more out of what we read, it makes us more efficient, it even lets us juxtapose posts as we see fit to help build a richer context. Interestingly, Google Reader was founded on this premise.

If you read some of the posts that Chris Wetherell wrote about the birth of Google Reader, you will find that he considered flexibility to be one of the foundational pieces of Reader.

“I believed a feed reader’s interface might have to be athletically flexible to match a wide variety of reading styles.” — Chris Wetherell

I don’t think this is true of just the interface either. Feed readers are already flexible, but they could do so much more. Folders and labels are a great place to start, and, as we have seen, there are a great many feed readers that support this form of flexibility. But we could see more. Even if it’s just so that we can support more people. Again, Wetherell:

“On this point I’m relying on data that is attainable at Google because of size and market dominance as well as having routine user studies and follow-up. So because of this data I’m making an assertion that there is something inherently different about the inflexibility of feed reading styles than compared with other software.” - Chris Wetherell

If this has upheld over the years, it’s possible that we haven’t fully expressed all the different ways a feed reader could work. That means feed readers aren’t as inclusive as they could be. There is even a bunch of low hanging fruit that hasn’t been picked yet.

The hygiene of RSS feeds is lacking, but there is a lot of metadata that can be gleaned from feeds that doesn’t seem to be widely used. For instance, authorship and tags. Why don’t we see more feed readers sort information in this manner? Being able to read the most recent stories by Author X and the most recent stories tagged B seems like a great feature for a feed reader. If you built features using this sort of information, a feed reader could be even more flexible.

Hopefully, you can see a couple of reasons why flexibility is key for feed readers. The more ways you can put two stories next to each other, the better off you are. The more ways in which we can juxtapose two posts, the better off we are. These contrasts spark new ideas in the reader and create a more interesting context.

Now that we covered context, I think it’s important to talk about motivation. It frames the entire issue. What motivates you to read? The answer to this question puts you on entirely different paths.

For example, if you are motivated to read to pass time, thats fine, but much of what I am talking about is useless to you. Yes, you are reading, but you aren’t reading for comprehension, nor are you reading because you want to move on to something else. Flipping through a magazine is like playing Angry Birds or channel surfing. It can be how some of us kill time, but it’s not reading efficiently. It’s fun, but there is no larger goal.

On the other hand, if you are motivated to read because you want to consume information and convert that information into knowledge, then you will want to read efficiently. That’s the kind of reading I’m writing about.

This can mean a number of things to people, and that’s fine. Some people want to read to stay up to date, others want to cover a lot of ground while not spending to much time reading. The idea is that reading efficiently covers the whole spectrum of reading goals.

Efficiency can be thought of as a mathematical formula. How much did you consume, in what amount of time, and what do you have to show for it? If you read a ton quickly, but you can’t recall what you read, then you are wasting your time. If you want to have a high recall, and thus consume a small amount of material slowly, that’s fine, but, as you can see, this is a balancing act. You need to decide what your goal is before you can do anything to optimize for it.

I try to practice a high volume, fast-paced, modest recall method. I read for work, for professional development, and because I enjoy it.

It can be hard to feel as if you aren’t just missing everything. After all, skimming is normally a lossy practice. It can be hard at times balancing skimming with understanding. But this is one area in which a feed reader shines.

One feature that many people ask for when they talk about replacements to Google Reader is de-duplication. A classic example is the announcement of a new service from a large tech company. Every tech blog is going to cover it. The argument is that if you subscribe to all the tech blogs, you should only see one article about the announcement.

But sometimes there are reasons to have many different posts about the same idea. It helps you to understand the main idea better. Each post will have a couple of different points about a new story. Each author understands the idea in a slightly different way. In this manner, by quickly scanning 3 or 4 takes on the same news story, you end up gaining many different perspectives into the announcement.

This helps you to understand what everyone is actually talking about. In this way, you can skim a number of articles, and you aren’t just doing this because you lack concentration. You are doing it because it can help you to understand the whole story.

Sync is key for feed readers got picked up by Dave Winer on Twitter here is what he had to say:

“Sync Is Key For Feed Readers (If so, then make web apps, and you’re done). http://4fj.r2.ly/” — @davewiner

And then Peter Rojas responded:

“@davewiner I need an offline mode for my RSS reader since I often read on the subway, so mobile app is important to me.” — @peterrojas

They went back and fourth a couple of times, but I think it boils down to the long term vs short term.

I am trying to write about what feed readers should do right now. People are looking for real alternatives, right now. Sync is still incredibly important for all the reasons I enumerated in the original article.

But, I have been told by learned people that most of what Dave Winer is talking about comes true. So, looking at this from his point of view I can see where he’s coming from.

Looking long, a few things are going to happen. The Internet will speed up. It will become more pervasive and your mode of consumption might converge. If that is the case then sync is less important. It’s totally possible that we will begin to converge upon HTML, or a common UI expression grammar. Again, if this is the case then sure a webapp could work.

Right now though, we don’t have much choice in the matter. We need to design something that can replace Google Reader and a key piece of that is sync.

I understand that I am innately drawn to people talking about RSS readers. I shouldn’t be surprised when I find a good quote about Google Reader any day, but these are two good quotes.

The first come from a tubmlr blog, I thought it appropriate, called Britticisms. She seems to be an RSS reader after my own heart. In response to the question, could you list some of the blogs you subscribe to via google reader, she started with:

“I’m only going to post up to five in each category because I am a neurotic that subscribes to tons of feeds. I also organize all of my feeds in subfolders for easy access.” - Britticisms

While I have fully embraced my odd love of feed readers Britticisms seems to be down right coy about it. It makes me wonder how many people don’t talk about their feed reader usage because they find it “neurotic”.

Anyway, the second quote comes from Ask MeFI in response to the announcement of yet another Reader replacementt. The discussion like many MeFI discussions is above average for the Internet, but there was one user who hit a cord with me:

“July is going to be so much more of a pain in the backside than people realize. After the initial shock, a lot of people were blithely smug, saying Reader’s complacency had held the “industry” back and that there would be plenty of startups to fill the gap, even going so far as to wish it good riddance. They’ve got no idea.

I did a lot of reading in the days after the shutdown announcement, from current and former Googlers and developers who worked with RSS, including mathowie (who flirted with the idea of making his own clone). Reader is like an iceberg, the vast scale and utility of which is hidden behind its deceptively minimalist, even outdated homepage.

It’s not just the interface and UI, which is pretty easy to clone. It’s the staggering infrastructure that powers it – the sophisticated search crawlers scouring the web and delivering near-real-time updates, the industrial-scale server farms that store untold petabytes of searchable text and images relevant to you (much of it from long-vanished sources), the ubiquitous Google name that makes the service a popular platform for innumerable third-party apps, scripts, and extensions.

It’s possible to code up something that looks and feels a lot like Reader in three months, with the same view types and shortcuts. But to replicate its core functionality – fast updates, archive search, stability, universal access, wide interoperability – takes Google-scale engineering I doubt anybody short of Micosoft/Yahoo can emulate. It was very nearly a public service, and its going to be frustrating trying to downsize expectations for such a core web service to what a startup – even a subscription-backed one – can accomplish.”

Rhaomi

I have said this a couple times now, and I will continue to say it. We don’t need another feed reader, what we need now is a stronger platform for all RSS readers.

Sync could simply be explained as the process of making everything the same in multiple places. In terms of an RSS reader, I think it’s the technical cornerstone of the tool. Information doesn’t care where you are or what device you are on. It is created at breakneck speeds, and you should be able to manage it from anywhere on any device. While this is a clear value proposition, not everyone would agree, but there are other reasons why sync is important.

Until the world has an ansible, information will take time to travel, and any means of connectedness can falter for any number of reasons: trains, planes, or living in a place with crappy mobile service are all ways in which many of us experience unreliable Internet connectivity. One way to combat this is to make sure there is a way to sync all unread posts. Many readers already do this, but not all. One reason they don’t — and I don’t think it’s a bad one — is that downloading all of your unread items is slow. That’s true if you are just grazing for information. But is that what you want to do when using a feed reader? You have to answer that yourself if you are making a feed reader, but I, your opinionated author, would argue that you should just do offline as a start, and do any other sync as an additional improvement.

Another reason to make sure that all unread stories are downloaded is context. I want to know where I am in my unread items. I don’t need to know the number, although that would be nice. What I need to know is how close to the end I am. That scroll bar on the right-hand side of the screen shows you where you are in relation to the end of the feed. When things get globbed on to the bottom as you go, you don’t ever really know how far down the feed you are. If you had all your items on your current device, you would know where you were.

Importantly, I don’t think one type of sync precludes another. Having a well-built backend would make it possible to do any kind of sync. Also, when considering the flexibility needed when creating a feed reader, this might be one of those things that you should be able to do in whatever ways makes sense. By making sure there is choice for the consumer, you can satisfy a wide array of reading habits. Yes, this is another reason for there to be many reading UIs connected to one platform.

Thanks to Jon Mitchell (@ablaze) for editing this post. He just started on amazing new journey at The Daily Portal if you are interested in new ways of publishing online you should check out his site.

Growing up I was told that I had a learning disability. Some form of dyslexia, I think, I don’t remember exactly what it was. I don’t really think about it that much now days because I don’t think its holding me back any. But, I have started to think that the reason I enjoy using feed readers so much is because of whatever learning disability I had, or have is. Also, how I use a feed reader as a tool to stay afloat could probably be used by others to achieve spectacular results.

I used to take these tests every other year or so. I remember them taking a whole day. They would ask me to do things like remember a series of numbers then repeat the series back to the proctor in reverse order. In another test they would equate words with symbols then display a page with only those symbols on them and ask me to interpret page into words. Some tests involved numbers, others involved grammar, and part was an oral interview about my life and how I dealt with school. The tests were used to test my cognition. How did information make it from the outside world into my head and what ways were best for me.

I was really bad at the reverse number thing. I couldn’t really go more then like 4 numbers. Holding things in my head has never been something I was good at.

Around my senior year in high school my parents got me a book about going to college and having a learning disability. If I can remember what it was called I will link to it here, but I can’t. The book had some good information, but there was one part that stuck out to me. It was something like.

You don’t have to read everything. What you need to figure out is what your professor wants you to get out of the reading. Then just answer that question. Also, if you enjoy something read it, but don’t waste time reading things that you only partially need to know.

It was an epiphany, It was this bright line that has followed me since. Up to this point I had felt as if I was failing at reading. I didn’t read everything that teachers assigned. Most cases, I’ll admit it, I was bored to tears by the reading, but other times, I just couldn’t read as fast as others.

In that moment though these two things in my life formed a new working theory for my studies. The recognition that I only needed to get out of reading what was needed for class mixed with all that testing helped me to realize that reading was a tool to gather information, and not the final goal. By understanding what I was looking for before I dove into it would help me at a bare minimum keep up with others. I realized that I just needed better tools.

At that time feed reading was just a glimmer in Dave Winer’s eye, but I was pre-destined to be a RSS user. Feed readers are the best tool for me to read a large amount of material, and walk away with some understand of what I just read. It is uniquely fitting to my cognition.

That said this tool that lets me stay afloat, should give everyone else super human reading powers. If I started with slightly broken cognition, and this tool is like my crutch, then for everyone else it should make them faster.

The reason why I think way to much about this stuff is that it has helped me out a lot.

David Pogue wrote a piece yesterday about Google reader. Explaining the Reader situation in plain english. In it I think he exemplifies the current market while completely missing the larger picture.

What he gets right is the broad picture, i.e., What a feed reader is, and what has happened. He had a good solid broad definition. Makes it sound simple, which could be one reason no one wants to pay, but sufficient.

“Google Reader is what’s called, somewhat geekily, a newsreader, or painfully geekily, an RSS aggregator.” — source

What he unintentionally though is exemplify the market. I can tell from this snippet that he doesn’t read sites like I do, he doesn’t read sites like Daring Fireball that are full content:

“Occasionally, you can read the entire article without leaving the newsreader page; that’s up to whoever published the article.” — source

Which exemplifies the market. There are is no one way that people read. Which means that not everyone will be pleased with feedly, the reader he recommends as a replacement.

I am left with a sense of anguish, sure he covered the bases, but I just have more questions that will go unanswered. If Google Reader is so niche that it couldn’t be a Google product, why the hell is David Pogue writing about it. Also there is no talk of money. How is Feedly going to survive when they don’t have a viable revenue source? Aren’t we just looking at another countdown to the closure of yet another feed reader?

What’s ever more clear to me is that we need a platform. One that is paid for, so that we can create a stable base for others to experiment on top of.