Freeware

FeedHub: Just What We Need…Another RSS Feed

Developer: mSpoke
Version: Beta
Price: Free
Operating Systems: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows

Click here to check out FeedHub

Solution to Too Many Feeds? Or Just Adding to the Mess?

FeedHub, a new service which analyzes your RSS feeds and then turns them all into one, easy to use feed which supposedly only displays items that you want to see, sounds like a great idea. How cool would that be to have a service that filters through all of the junk in your RSS feed and only give you news clippings that you would want to see. In execution, however, FeedHub is not exactly all it’s cracked up to be.

I, like most of you out there, suffer from an overload of feeds. As I’m sure is the case with most of us, I barely have enough time in the day to sort through each and every little news story that comes my way. After all, I’ve got coding and Photoshop tutorials, news from sites like Download Squad, a variety of topics from Digg, some software update sites, and a couple of Web 2.0 repositories. Yeah, nearly 1,000 new items a day in my reader is way too much to handle. And after hearing about FeedHub last week, I figured that I would be the perfect candidate to give it a go.

So I signed up, sent them a copy of my OPML file (that’s the file that your feed reader uses to keep track of all of your feeds) and in a couple of days, I was gifted with a shiny new feed that only showed items based on my personal preferences. Except for one tiny problem - it didn’t seem to know what I wanted at all.

Now, FeedHub tries. It does get a story right every once in awhile. But most of the time, I find that it simply does not choose stories that I find even remotely interesting. And it doesn’t send them often enough. I get one item an hour from my FeedHub personalized feed - maybe. From over 100 items, FeedHub chooses one. That’s not exactly what I was looking for. I know FeedHub is trying to make my feed reading life easier, but only showing 1% of the news when I have the app set to “Show Me the Most Interesting” is a bit of overkill.

As it stands now, my FeedHub feed is sitting there in my RSS reader, ever so quietly, even with hundreds of new stories appearing from my other feeds every time I hit the refresh button. Although there is a bit of tweaking that can be done on the FeedHub site if you want to really tune your custom feed, it doesn’t really seem to do much. Just adds one or two extra items based on your selections every few hours.

I think I’ll stick with FeedHub for a couple more weeks to see if it gets any better. It is still a new service, so I don’t want to ditch it completely. At this point, I am not going to recommend FeedHub. If I can squeeze some kind of benefit out of it I will certainly change my tune, but not at this point.

On a positive note, the FeedHub website is nicely designed. Everything is easy to find, the colors are appealing to the eyes, and it is obviously designed for one task and one task only.

Click here to check out Feedhub.

- Eric Norton