Advancing RSS feeds to Generation Deux

I have been using RSS for a number of years and I kinda think I’m in a rut. Yeah, my simple RSS program works but it doesn’t:

1. Put my lists online so that I don’t have to create duplicate lists from computer to computer

2. Put shared lists online as recommendations for family, friends, and coworkers

3. Auto archive based on usage or lack there of

4. Rate RSS feeds by popularity both by the number of times I access it and by traffic to the site

So I took a very small sample survey by walking down the hallway. Everyone want these kind of services and more. But no one had taken the time to go out there and find a great solution. So in this the first part of my research I further define my wants for the new system.

Put my lists online

I have different RSS feed lists for my different interests. The CRM reading list is at about 100 blogs. The friends and families is smaller. And the music and jazz RSS feed list is approaching 200 feeds. But depending upon where I am there are multiple copies of the same thing. At work I have three computers. At home I have two that I use regularly. No two machines have the same lists and that is a problem. I know I can copy my feeds to a skydrive and copy it to another machine but serious, that would be a weekly activity to keep the lists in sync.

Shared Lists

I want to be able to share my lists. I want to be able to scan lists that my friends, family and coworkers share. I can do this manually a number of ways. But I want it to be as easy as a check mark when I add a feed; do you want to share this feed? Yes. No.

Auto Archive

Wouldn’t it be nice if you RSS would periodically at an interval you selected pop up and say, “You haven’t used the following feeds for over a year. Do you want to keep them?” I don’t wanna even think about pruning my many, many RSS feed lists.

Rating Feeds

I’d like to know which feeds, out of the hundred I read, are the most popular by my accesses. I’d also like to know which are the most popular by traffic to the feed. In my perfect world each Link string would be followed by a color coded icon for each statistic. My accesses a head icon colored Green for top 20%, Yellow for middle 60%, and Red for bottom 20%. And the traffic info might be a star icon with the same color scheme. No really.

So I write this in hopes that some of the power users like John, Aaron, or Menno will respond with a, “Hey dufus, that functionally already exists using *this* technology. It would save me a lot of time that I will probably be using to test many different Web 2.0 services, from social news giant Digg to commenting services like Intense Debate and CoComment to feed readers like FeedBurner. Heck, I’m even looking startup CrunchBase’s fav.or.it.

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