smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Lets just get this out in the open - I use Thunderbird as my email and RSS client.

It’s been good to me, up until recently. It’s getting to a point now with the increasing amounts of email and RSS feed explosion, that I have found myself totally and utterly swamped with content and it’s not going to get any less busy as the numbers of great blog authors and content keeps on coming and as I find myself involved in increasing numbers of projects. I desperately need simplicity.

I’ve been trialling Touchstone, which whilst is a decent RSS reader (that has some amazing smarts in learning my preferences) it still misses some critical features, such as proper feed management, a centralised reading pane and an ability to ‘mark all read’. Don’t get me wrong - Touchstone rocks and has a great deal of promise.. it’s just not *there* yet.

And I’ve gotten into the flow of centralised content management — thanks to google reader I’ve discovered the joys of harmonious and simple content navigation and reading. It’s great for when one is on the go, or accessing feeds outside of the confines of one’s own personal computer.

Google mail is another option — but whilst reader has been positively storming ahead, with numerous enhancements, Google mail has yet to offer even the most rudimentary of content management options, outside of tagging (try having 3 accounts on the go and then work out which email came from where).

It’s utterly marvellous in a single-account-per-view way, but throw three or four POP3 accounts at it and the whole thing turns into an inexorably congealed mass of messages with no simple ability to separate out that which needs to be.

So now I seek an email and rss client that just works — I want a tool that can handle whatever I have to throw at it and then I want it to love taking even more on. Want to know what the next killer application should be? Want to know a product that will have stratospheric impact? Listen very carefully..

I want a tool that can take several different sources of information, be it RSS feeds, email, google groups, twitter, or whatever I choose, present it in a logical and well defined manner, with the ability to tag content, sort based on a series of rules, present data in the order of my preference (this is where Touchstone is starting to make serious inroads) give me the ability to search, make the process of adding accounts and feeds point-and-click and finally free me from what has become an increasingly complex task — that should be so very simple.

I believe that Touchstone is on to something with their APML format and associated concepts, but for a real contender to be useful, it’s but one of several new philosophies, such as ‘tag’ driven organisation across multiple formats and intelligent source handling, that is really needed to capture the content we all view, every day, in any number of software products. It’s going to take a multi-pronged approach — blending the older technologies with new presentation ways.

Whilst the human brain can cope with vast amounts of data, process and catalogue, order and file.. we’ve yet to really figure out just how to apply the same concepts to electronic content. We’re still using RSS readers, email clients and tools that haven’t really changed in a number of years — it’s time that changed.

It’s time for a new generation of content reader that is intelligent, Internet savvy, able to learn, aware of my needs and wants, that can go find the content that interests me, then catalogue, sort and prioritise it in the order I prefer and make it available either online or off-line (keeping the two synced).. all done in the background, without endlessly needing my attention or effort to manage.