TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Alex Payne on the future of feed readers:

I’m not sure what the solution is here. Feed readers as we’ve known them are dying, but it’s as yet unclear what will take their place. Filtering feeds for relevance algorithmically seems all but fruitless; filtering through the social graph is only a slight improvement, but misses the rare content that may only strike a chord with a small audience.

I don’t think any algorithm, unaided by manual input, will ever be able to identify quality content no matter the subject, all on its own. There is no way to programatically define what is and isn’t worth reading because it is so incredibly vague.

Like Alex, I think the future is in using social data to recommend articles. Twitter links, Instapaper starred article feeds, weblog feeds and, possibly in the future, saved article lists from Fever, all from like-minded individuals. These should all be used as input to sort through.

This could all be done manually by the user — identify which individuals you want to use as sources, and put them into the application, just as Fever currently works with RSS feeds. But what intrigues me (and I wrote about this last week) is the idea that an application could identify substantive communities. This could help solve the problem Alex identifies — finding the “small” content, the article not many people are linking to and that may only appeal to a small subset of people, because the application will be able to see who fits into each community and what they are reading and linking to.

The second promising area is in applications analyzing user reading habits, just as iTunes uses user listening habits to find links between songs. Alex points out that Fever works in the technology community because we have an abundance of good link blogs, but that just isn’t true for other communities. By looking at reading habits, applications can further supplement links as a means of recommending articles, thus solving that issue.