If you are anything like me, you probably subscribe to about fifty sites that have RSS feeds, and therefore you get several hundred news items per day. The ability to get news and updates on exactly the stuff that you care about is great, but there is so much room for improvement. There have been efforts before to algorithmically pick which news items might interest you, but what I have in mind is different.

I would like to see an RSS reader that is smart enough to group news items that are repeated across multiple feeds. There are just too many stories that get picked up by several sites, so it makes sense to collapse the duplicates down and just show one of them. Of course, you could expand the duplicate list if you felt like you needed more detail than what one of the items provided. This could be really difficult to handle though. For instance, the RSS reader would need to be smart enough to distinguish between a site picking up a story much later than everyone else, and a site posting a story that is somewhat different than a story being picked up by many others.

Also, I would love to have the ability to block news items that contain certain phrases. I can’t tell you how tired I got of hype for the 3G iPhone… I don’t own one, and I’m not going to own one. I could really give a damn if PwnageTool works or not or how many people are lined up outside the Apple Store! Similarly, I want the ability to truncate or block really long news items. TechCrunch is horrible about posting insanely long, in depth analyses of sites or people that I don’t care about and just skip over anyway.

So uh, someone make an intelligent RSS reader and give me a cut of the profits.

You don’t have to look very hard to see that web based applications are becoming the new face of computing. While Google probably offers the largest and most comprehensive selection of web based apps, competitors like Zoho, Xdrive, and Facebook have all churned out impressive products that are competing very strongly with Google in their respective areas. That’s where a new site called AppJet comes in. It makes developing web based apps quicker and easier by allowing you to enter Javascript code right into your browser, store it on AppJet’s servers, and access it from a subdomain (myprogram.appjet.com for example). You can also view the source of any app hosted by AppJet. This gives you the ability to learn by example, improve on other’s code, etc. The significance of what AppJet is offering is pretty obvious. The question is, will any Google-crushing applications be built on their platform, or will it just be a collection of millions of useless “hello world” programs? The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but only time will tell for sure.

Pandora may not be for everyone, but I think it’s pretty rad. So rad, in fact, that I have been listening to one station for about a month. This has led me to hear a lot of the same songs over and over again. Almost two years ago, Pandora added the “I’m tired of this song” feature … but either I am slowly going insane, or this feature does not work. Clicking this option will skip to the next song, but as little as six songs later, the old song will be repeated. Someone tell me I’m not crazy!