AOL will update their feed reader soon

Techcrunch reports that AOL will be upgrading their feed reader with new AJAX tricks and better OPML support. Check out the report on Techcrunch.

Also Nick of Feeddemon has released version 2.5 of his great desktop feed reader including item sharing through News Bins and a great popular topics feature.

It's more than redundant to say now, but it's clear that aggregation (in all forms) is here to stay and will be one of the primary ways people recieve and manage their information. From the mainstream AOL offerings to the power-user ready Feeddemon.

The next frontier, of course, is adding in Personal Relevancy.

Touchstone system resources are kicking butt

In the latest build of Touchstone we have taken the system resources from up to (on my PC) 80% CPU and about 200-300meg of RAM (in early alpha) to now (in early beta) up to 20% and 100meg of RAM. Typically though it runs at 0% CPU and <100meg of RAM.

In fact, my Touchstone is using less resources than FeedDemon - and everyone knows how much I love FeedDemon!



This is, of course, using the same OPML file + Touchstone is also finding additional information for me based on my Attention Profile beyond my RSS feeds.

Your turn Nick! :)

Information Addiction - no seriously hah

Marjolein just pointed me to a post by Kirk Biglione (Kirk.. great name).

He has just published a post called "My Life as an RSS Junkie". I feel sorry for him. 1000 feeds and counting.

He (rightly?) blames Nick Bradbury for his addictions. I too would like to blame Nick - his app is the first I tried and I still use it to this day. It started me on this wonderful journey of RSS reading. Maybe a class action is in order? Just kidding Nick :)

He writes:

Things really started going down hill around the time I discovered FeedDemon. Damn that Nick Bradbury! With FeedDemon I was tracking nearly a thousand feeds a day. I’d focus on the topics I was most interested in by setting up watch lists. At first I thought that FeedDemon was helping me to effectively manage my information addiction. On the contrary, the problem was actually getting worse. I eventually realized that the more blogs I read, the more blogs I subscribed to. Each day I’d add a dozen new feeds to FeedDemon. It was a vicious circle. My feed reading began taking up larger chunks of my day.

At some point I came to my senses and realized that I had a serious problem. I had become overwhelmed by the sheer number of feeds that I’d subscribed to.

I am not sure if Kirk is the right user for Touchstone though. Kirk is the sort of user who needs to know what every post in every feed says. He could use it in conjunction with FeedDemon to get alerts about important posts when he is doing other things... but by the sounds of it he doesn't do other things.

Good luck Kirk - sign up to the mailing list and give Touchstone a try. I'd be fascinated to hear if it helps.