Brent Simmons talks about the issues with feed items that are about the same thing showing up in an RSS aggregator. I’m reposting the comment I made on his post here because I think managing the relationships between items is an important feature for RSS aggregators:
The ability to group feed items together based on what they link to is the only feature I miss in NNW from Dare Obasanjo’s RSS Bandit. It’s important for three reasons:
- It saves time. Some of the other comments cover this point [specifically, by grouping items that are about the same thing, you can read them all at once or just mark them all as read. Otherwise, you keep finding posts about the same thing all the way down your list of items.]
- It helps me follow conversations. Think of it as a client side version of Technorati–limited, of course, to the feeds I subscribe to.
- It aids in triangulation. I want to be able to quickly scan all the opinions of a new announcement, or quickly see the full original post that an item linked to so I can form my own opinion.
Maybe it’s not grouping, but some sort of optional “related items” UI that could show you items that link to the same things that are linked from the item you’re reading.