Aggregators Attack Info Overload

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02:00 AM Aug. 18, 2003 PT

Maniacally wired netizens who read a hundred blogs a day and just as many news sources are turning to a new breed of software, called newsreaders or aggregators, to help them manage information overload.

Many now say that their news aggregator is as indispensable as their e-mail client.

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Aggregators, such as NewsGator and AmphetaDesk, allow users to subscribe to feeds from sources as diverse as the BBC, Sci-Fi Today, Slashdot and thousands of bloggers across the world. The services work by checking an Internet address at a regular interval, usually once an hour, to see if new content has been added.

The feeds are written according to one of a few competing shared specifications, which are collectively referred to as RSS, which stands, depending on who you talk to, for really simple syndication or rich site summary.

At heart, RSS is simply a specification that a site uses to produce a page of XML code. The code breaks up each entry or story on a website by title, description and direct link. An aggregator then determines how to display that output in a reader.

For instance, the popular aggregator SharpReader, which runs on Microsoft's .NET framework, displays RSS feeds in a window similar to that of a standard e-mail client. The difference is that the items in the folders are not e-mail messages; they are news stories or individual blog entries.

Users say the clean interfaces let them read hundreds of stories and blog entries in less than half the time it would take using a browser and a favorites list.

"I'm subscribed to 200 feeds," said Luke Hutteman, who designed SharpReader. "Last year, I didn't even know what an aggregator was."

Though newsreaders have been around almost as long as Usenet and the Internet, some prominent bloggers and programmers argue that better syndication standards and more sophisticated readers herald the next big leap for life on the Internet.

"I'm a voracious reader and I built the software because I couldn't stand the Web without it," said Brent Simmons, who says the number of downloads of his Macintosh-based aggregator, NetNewsWire, is now in five figures. "The demand for aggregators is just going to tip over at some point and go wild."

Over the last year, the number of aggregators available has exploded, with shareware and paid aggregators now available for every common operating system and even for PDAs and iPods.

Some even say the emergence of the aggregator is the best thing since a visual Web browser.

"It's going to subsume e-mail and subsume many forms of publicity," said Steve Gillmor, a technology columnist and blogger. "The problem with e-mail is trying to stop a fire hose of data with a thumb in a dike."

Gillmor argues that RSS will solve the spam problem with "mutual syndication," since aggregators subscribe and retrieve data in what's called a "pull model," as opposed to e-mail, which other people push to a user's e-mail account. He also believes that RSS can be helpful in suggesting new sources of information, based on what others with similar feeds are reading.

Not everyone in the RSS community is as bullish as Gillmor.

"I can see the headline now, 'Death of E-mail. News at 11,'" said Kevin Burton, who created the aggregator NewsMonster. "I don't think so."

Still, those who use and build RSS aggregators, including Burton, expect RSS to conquer some of the communications territory currently held by announcement lists and online mailing lists such as Yahoo Groups. Many also expect companies to turn increasingly to RSS and aggregators for internal communications.

The next step for aggregators, according to Hutteman and Burton, is including collaborative-filtering capabilities along the lines of Amazon.com's automated recommendation system.

NewsMonster, which runs inside a Mozilla browser, already has a relevance and reputation reporting system built into the pay version of the software so a user can rate an item and other users can view vote tallies to decide what is important to read.

"I want to solve the question of 'I don't have any time and I subscribe to 500 feeds. I just got off the plane. What do I need to read?'" said Burton.

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More stories written by Ryan Singel