Capping IT Off

I have the feeling that I get more and more overloaded with information from my social network memberships, subscribed RSS feeds and email accounts. Sometimes I can’t even catch up anymore and prefer to just delete the whole list of feeds instead of saving them for another time, since it just won’t get any better…

There are a couple of web applications that try to find a solution for it:

• Yahoo! Pipes: Yahoo! offers a solution where you can "aggregate, mainpulate and mashup content from around the web". Honestly, it's one of those cool kick-ass online tools where a genuine "wow" comes out of your mouth. Pipes offers you a solution where you can graphically put feeds together and apply filters to it. You can say that you want to have feeds from CNN that only matches your regular expression or rule and for the result, it has to fetch pictures from flickr.com. Have a look at this movie to get an idea.
• Friendfeed: Friendfeed solves the problem of having to keep track of all your social networks and feeds in order to be updated about your friends' activities. Pretty cool web application that is backed by some top venture capitalists. If we apply Yahoo! Pipes to Friendfeed.... ouch! It brings us already one step closer to what we want...
• NewsGator: NewsGator's approach is not unique, there are more web-based RSS feed readers out there, but I have to say that NewsGator's is pretty well-developed. But imagine that for each post that you can say whether you like it or not (a bit like what Facebook offers on the activity list) and perhaps also the reason and that your RSS feed reader learns from it.

So basically we want something that is a mix of all of the above. Here's what I would want to see: some wicked abracadabra AI engine that perfectly knows what you want and do not want to read. But there are some problems. For instance I am not interested in chickens, but I do like to be updated on initiatives like www.adopteereenkip.nl where you can adopt a chicken (I am about to adopt one) to support a good cause. But how does the rule engine know that I do want to be updated on chicken adoption initiatives and not on some weird mad chicken disease stuff?

Someone that can help me out? I'm pretty sure the chickens would really appreciate it...

*update 6.35 pm @ mumbai: "Influenced" by the comments I finally joined Twitter as well. I could resist for quite some time, but now my resistance has been broken. You can follow me on the account leeprovoost. In the meanwhile let's republish the link to Capgemini's Netvibes page with their Twitter stuff: http://tinyurl.com/34h5oq. Happy Twittering! (and now my social life is really ruined... thanks...)