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Remember how you used to save your bookmarks in the browser (Favorites if you use Internet Explorer)? Then when you discovered del.icio.us you realised that you no longer had to maintain your bookmarks in two different browsers on three separate PCs. And you could use the fact that everybody else kept their bookmarks in the same place to make connections between your bookmarks and other people’s

You don’t go back to using local bookmarks once you have seen the world of social bookmarking.

Browsers have been around a lot longer than feed aggregators. Maybe that’s why we are still happy to keep our feed collections locally. Maybe we simply haven’t discovered social feed collections yet. But this would be the answer to something that is annoying me a lot more now than it did a few months ago.

As more and more of the information I consume is available in a syndicated format, I add more and more channels to my aggregator. Some important messages now come through my aggregator. I am starting to depend on it for critical notifications. Wherever I go, my aggregator is open on my desktop and it is as necessary to me as my email client and my chat client.

So the fact that I have to re-read the same posts that I have just checked when I move to a different PC is starting to bug me. The fact that I have to add a new channel manually to each aggregator on each PC is starting to bug me.

I want to keep my feed collection centrally, outside my aggregator. And the Read/Not Read status of the posts too. del.icio.us for feeds. That’s what I need. You read it here first. Stop and think about it for a minute before I start talking about implementation problems.

  1. There is, of course, a chicken and egg issue. There’s no point storing my feed collection centrally unless my aggregator can use the central store. The central store won’t get any kind of critical mass until most common aggregators are using it. None does at the moment.

  2. The second point is that once you have decided to store your feed collection centrally and also the Read/Not Read status for each post then you are very close to deciding to store the posts themselves centrally. I’m not sure about this although it seems to be a logical conclusion.

  3. I don’t understand the business model of del.icio.us sufficiently to understand how you could finance a feed.licio.us equivalent.

I hope these are mere details :-)  If we build it they will come, as somebody once said.

p.s. This post arose from a conversation with Adam Tennet