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.