Feed Hub: Better Feed Reading

If your mantra has become "so many feeds, so little time!", then you will love the new service from Feed Hub. Feed Hub lets you cut through the noise & brings you just the news and info you really want from all those RSS feeds you subscribe to. To use Feed Hub, you create an account and upload your OPML file. (An OPML file is a list of your RSS feeds). If you don’t know how to get your OPML file, a handy drop-down box is available listing some of the more popular RSS feed readers, like Google Reader, Bloglines, and NewsGator. Click your reader and instructions for exporting your OPML file will display. Once your OPML is uploaded, the Feed Hub service lets you un-select any feeds you don’t want to include and then configure your settings. You options are to either have Feed Hub include only the most interesting items, only exclude the least interesting items, or, for even more granular control, you can specify how many items you want to read per day, which can be entered as either a number or a percentage. Feed Hub will then analyze your OPML to create a personalized feed for you.

This service has a lot of possibilities: you can generate a quick-read feed to give you just the highlights from a set of feeds that you don’t want to read in their entirety; you can create really broad or really detailed personalized feeds on any topic; or you can audition feeds to see if they’re worthy of being subscribed to full-time. So, how does the service do? It’s hard to say, since after subscribing to my first personalized feed, I got the message that "Because of the enthusiastic response to our launch at DEMOFall this week, we are a bit overwhelmed with the number of new feeds being created and are actively beefing up our infrastructure to meet the demand. While you can normally expect to see new content in your feed every 3-4 hours, it will currently take 24 hours to start getting content in your new feed." Oh well, no instant gratification here…but the service sounds cool enough to be worth the wait.