Louis Gray has 10 excellent suggestions for improvements to the usability of Google Reader — which I think can be and should be in all online RSS feed readers.

1. “More Like This” Suggestions
A section that shows similar feeds to the subscribed ones.

2. Eliminate Duplicate Feed Items
The ability to determine if a story has already been read, and not display it. A lot of feeds (like Google News RSS feeds) have feed errors that creates duplicate items.

3. Add Negative Keywords
The ability to automatically not display feed items that contain user specified keywords.

4. Share Items Without Subscriptions
Enable the ability to share RSS items without first requiring subscription to the feed.

5. Aggregate Reader Statistics
Display of aggregate statistics from all users. e.g. What are the most frequently read blogs?

6. Addition of Search
Ability to search for keywords in all items or all unread items of a feed.

7. Create a Link Blogs Directory
Show a directory of shared link blogs, organized both alphabetically and ranked by popularity of readership.

8. Further Integrate “Trends”
Add “Trends” to the menu for easy access.

9. Expand Individual Feed Statistics
Add more statistics by feed. e.g. Timing and frequency of updates.

10. Customization Everywhere
Ability to customize the look and feel of the feed reader interface itself.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: aggregate_statistics, blogs, feed_reader, news_rss, search_ability, usability

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 3:12 am and is filed under Blogging Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.