Socket Jockeying

As I’ve blogged about before, I have fallen in love with Google Reader.  It has just the right amount of flexibility for my news reading needs.  Where others had failed me (including the very powerful, but still constraining – for me - FeedDemon) Google Reader seems to have succeeded.  Of course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of room for improvement.

In one such area, I cannot believe that I’m the only user out there that has problems.  I basically have two types of feeds that I subscribe to, one type are infrequent posted or very high value feeds, where I want to read (or at least see and decide not to read) each post that comes from the feed.  The other type are true “news” feeds.  These may be “real” news like the New York Times and TechCrunch, or idle chatter feeds like Valleywag.  Nonetheless, this 2nd type of feed is not well serviced today.

These feeds generate a huge amount of daily traffic.  On the days where I can keep up with it (I do have a day job) I’m not sure I want to.  However, if I actually step away from using Reader for a day or two, the backlog on these feeds can be crushing.  What I want to see for such feeds is the concept of decay.

Said another way, feeds that are highly time sensitive should have the option of aging out in my reader.  I don’t like seeing that Techcrunch has 251 unread items (it stresses me out, this same stress is why I cannot use feed readers that overload the concept of email – more inboxes to triage is the last thing I want).  In reality, I only really care about the last 24 to 36 hours of posts from such a site.  Any older unread posts should age out of my unread information.

Of course, as I note, I don’t want this behavior for all feeds I own.  Instead, the decay of posts should be a per-feed setting (or maybe/also per-folder, if you’re an “organize feeds into folders” type of person). 

Extra points if metadata could be saved to note if something was unread, read, or unread and aged out for later historical search filtering.