In my last post I mentioned good old Usenet. For most of the 1990’s it was my main source of technical information and support. As it has been around for a long time, the Newsreaders gained more and more extremely useful features. The good ones allowed you to churn through very high volume newsgroups quickly and efficiently, reading and tagging threaded discussions.

Over the past few years, Google Groups and Yahoo Groups have displaced Usenet in many cases. And obviously you can get to Usenet anyway via Google Groups. There are three ways of getting at the posts there - either directly in your browser, via RSS feeds or via e-mail. The sad thing is that e-mail is the most efficient from a reading perspective because you can read the conversations in a threaded way with a three-pane view and quickly delete what is uninteresting and flag what isn’t.

In an ideal world, this information would be coming in as an RSS feed into your RSS reader along with all your other feeds. Usenet posts should be treated no differently to blog posts. You could even think of individual newsgroups as group blogs. But from what I can see, all RSS readers view incoming entries as a stream of chronological posts with maybe some simple grouping of feeds themselves. In fact many use this as their main feature - the Google Reader River of News idea.

That’s a perfectly fine model for news and opinions but not for detailed technical discussions of specific tools or technologies. In those cases you need the old threaded model where related messages are grouped together and you can slice and dice the posts whatever way you want.

For me, the best newsreader of the late 90’s was Forte Agent. It was masterful at managing massive volumes of posts and allowing you to get at the information you wanted and filtering out the stuff you didn’t. In fact, it looks like they are back in business after a long period of silence. I know that none of the web-based readers could come anywhere near the sort of capabilities I am talking about (and no, a few Technorati watchlists will not cut it as a “filter”). For most feed reading I am happy with Bloglines and give Rojo a spin regularly to see how it is coming along but both are utterly inept at handling the volumes coming from some of the Google Groups.

Looking at the ATOM feed from Google Groups, only the Entry Title seems to be common, there is no concept of a thread or “in reply to”. The addition to each reply of the URL of the opening post would be a big help. But even simply title matching would give usable threading.

Do any of the rich RSS client apps have features like threading, sorting, flagging, ignoring? If not, is anyone building one?

I think the Forte guys should seriously consider building RSS capabilities into Agent too because I really can’t see a business surviving on a Usenet reader alone.

[tags]Usenet, Agent, Forte Agent, Bloglines, Rojo, Threaded[/tags]