Attensa’s New RSS Reader Learns Your Preferences
I talk quite a bit about the changes in behavior brought on by RSS (define) to those who depend on the online world for information (we keep phone books only in case of power outages).
My spiel goes like this:
- In the 1990’s people surfed for information - clicking hyperlinks to discover cool stuff and wasting hours of fun. (Portals (define) became important in the late 90’s to help people organize information.)
- In the early 2000’s people searched for information - using search engines to find cool stuff.
- In about 2006 people started to subscribe to information - getting cool stuff delivered to you automatically, based on interests you’ve indicated.
RSS has actually made people who use the web extensively to be far more productive:
Imagine being able to have all of your news feeds, all of your competitor’s web site updates and announcements, and all of the latest changes in your partners’ web sites delivered right to your Outlook inbox, as the news and changes are made.
Portland-based Attensa (and new client of mine) has just upped the ante today, with Attensa for Outlook 2.5, an RSS reader that prioritizes articles based on learning your feed and article reading behaviors.
Eric Hayes, with whom I worked at Now Software a million years ago, (and now Attensa’s VP of R&D) has come up with technology that predicts your reading preferences based on your history of consuming feeds - what you read first, what you never open…
The best part? The reader is free. It’s beta - but these guys are rock solid developers - I’ve used their beta software for years. Download Attensa for Outlook and see how quickly it can help you cut through your life’s information overload…
I just hope it doesn’t screen out my blog feeds!
Not that anyone would ever want to filter out your feed, but you should make a permanent (display Janet Johnson) line of code a mandatory part of your compensation structure