News

Just not what you want. Too much 'Made You Look!'. Too much rehashing. Too much process journalism. No consequences. No real world building. No real analysis, just storytelling. I'd like less of what I get and all of these. Also: It's not on my Kindle, so not on my phone and not on my forthcoming Kindle Paperwhite, readable in bed, after my girlfriend turned the light off.

Feeds

It's one thing that not enough sources output them anymore, but the feed reading process is broken. I've recently recovered from feed reading bankruptcy after about 2 weeks of not attending to my feeds. The experience was horrible; too much piling through the same shit, too much piling through shit I've actually already seen on Twitter or Facebook. What I'd like from my feed reader is higher relevance and "scale adjusted relevancy". When I don't have the attention, I want the required attention to scale so I can catch up in one go on 14 days, not have to do 14 days of feed-tending work. My feeds should be a newspaper. A week old feed-surface should be a weekly magazine. A month old feed-surface should be a monthly magazine. A year old feed-surface should be an annual review. None of this should require anything but collaborative work.

Blogs

Well, mine is anyway. What's particularly broken about is it subpar integration with the flows, and the absence of readership after everyone moved to flows.

Twitter

Shutting down the client competition and innovation. Shutting down feeds and unauthorized access. Shutting off access to the follower graph. This is all bullshit. Twitter has become old media, like Edd Dumbill says, and is as broken as old media.

Are the fixes for all of these connected? Is it one-true-thing? I think I have a dream about what it is. It's blogs again, but this time hooked up to a 'reasonable' aggregator with a mission to act as an infrastructure company. The aggregator connects islands of users to form a distro twitter. The aggregator is uniquely positioned to sell firehose access to the social feed, to the graph, to collaboratively enhanced shared links. It Just Might Work.
I'm imaging this getting built off an open source conversational platform - you're allowed to think Diaspora - which initially thinks of itself as a caching hosted twitter client, but really is intended to allow other hosted islands of friends to connect. I think Diaspora got it wrong by inventing too much, and claiming too much. What I really want is just to leave, without slamming the door shut.