Threaded RSS readers for Yahoo! and Google Groups

Conor O'Neill asks a very interesting question - does a threaded RSS reader exist? He observes that both Yahoo! and Google Groups now offer RSS notifications but notes that e-mail notifications are still, sadly, more "efficient from a reading perspective because you can read the conversations in a threaded way with a three-pane view and quickly delete what is uninteresting and flag what isn’t."

So, how can the problem be resolved such that feed 'notification' regains the efficiency title over email? All it will take is a little cooperation from the discussion hosts. Here's the way Yahoo! and Google Groups should work - instead of providing a single RSS feed per discussion forum they should spawn off feeds for each topic thread and sub-thread (for as many levels as necessary). Then the user would have a choice of subscribing to a single digest/spliced feed or grazing individual threads. Importantly, the traditional feed subscription model is broken for this new reality. Danny Ayers quoted me in February when I was originally pondering the reason why -

"I’m actually coming to the conclusion that the whole subscriptions mindset is a problem and that in future we’ll ‘graze’ for the most part instead of subscribing."

You see OMPL was just made for the hierarchical representation of feeds and it can model perfectly threaded RSS streams. But few feed readers currently allow for proper OPML navigation - you can only import and organize collections of feeds in a single flat level, not a hierarchy. That's where Feed Grazers like Taskable, Optimal Browser and Grazr* are different - they allow you to navigate multi-level OPML hierarchies.

So here's how the next generation Yahoo! Groups and Feed Grazers will work together. While viewing a Group in your web browser you'll see a little feed icon inside every topic thread and sub-thread. These will be AJAXified such that you can click on them to add the discussion to your watchlist without invoking an immediate browser refresh. On you'll go adding more and more thread and sub-thread feeds to your collection like a squirrel hoarding acorns.

Yahoo! will provide you with a single OPML URL for all your Groups subscriptions - each node at the top level will correspond to a Group. The next level down will be a node corresponding to each topic lead and the leaves will be feed items (individual topic posts), or sub-nodes as necessary. Perfect for digesting in a feed grazer.

So my final note to Conor is this: Threaded RSS reader = Feed Grazer. Now all we need is the threaded RSS!

*I'm on the advisory board of Grazr Corp.

Technorati Tags: rss, feed grazer, grazr, optimal browser