As our lists of feeds grow it becomes more difficult to sort through the clutter that greets us as we fire up our news aggregators. The list of publishers of supported feeds continues to grow, as does the appetite for consumption. The next important step in the feed aggregation space will be how you tame the data available within the application. I propose sorting services that would allow developers to offer their own reclassification of a list of feeds or their content.
Pass a list of feeds in OPML and a web service will return the same OPML with an additional “sortorder” attribute for each outline element. The aggregator consumes the OPML, sorts on sortorder ascending for the group, and the user receives a different representation of their subscribed feeds.
Possible sort plug-ins include Google PageRank, Technorati source authority, degrees of separation through a social network, FOAF relations, blogroll, etc.
I sent NewsGator an e-mail asking if they would support sort plug-ins. If you develop a feed aggregator and would be interested in pursuing broad sorting solutions, let’s start building. Do you have ideas about more ways to sort your feeds? Leave a comment or send a TrackBack.