I’ve been thinking some more about the whole, information overload, autogenerated echo, crossposting thing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want RSS feeds aggregated for me on yet another web service, I don’t want every feed from every person and have to filter them out (and for duplicates). In short I want all my information in one place, custom search feeds and the like as well as people’s RSS, news as well as flickr tag feeds.

I like the Google Reader experience, I like that it’s in sync across my laptop, my phone, other computers. Google Reader could blow FriendFeed and others away if it implemented a few new features.

Here’s my new feature wishlist for Google Reader:

• The ability to filter feeds as the come in (by location would be great, I have a lot of searches for “Birmingham” and only want the UK versions).
• The ablitity to remove duplicate items from different feeds (and chose which “original” version remains). Two examples: blog/news results in my search feeds when I already subscribe to the originating feed. Also removing auto generated posts: twitters in friends’ Facebook statuses or “daliy links” posts in blogs when I already subscribe to the del.icio.us feed.
• Filters to “mark as read” posts (similar to GMail). By tag would be fine — Google Reader’s search feature is brilliant (allowing you to seach within everything that’s come through), there are things I’d like to be able to search (obsure news feeds, heavy feeds like Digg content) but I don’t want to have them as outstanding posts to be read. You’d be building up your own subset of the web.
• See other people’s notes (if shared of course) — the new notes feature is great, you could have a conversation with the notes if you could see other peoples’. A little like the “comment on anything” stuff that people are hot for on FriendFeed.

I’ve had a lot of comments recently, mosty from this girl (using various names). While Flickr respond quickly to spam reports (much more quickly than any other customer service requests) that’s not really the point. There must be something they can do to stop registration of these spam accounts - maybe not allow people to comment until they’ve uploaded some photos?

Flickr finally inched out video hosting today, for pro users only and only up to 90 seconds. To tell the truth it’s not something that I’ve been calling for – it’s not as if there aren’t enough video sharing sites on the web. Flickr is the web-geeks’ photo sharing site of choice due to it’s fabulous API (imagine a video site with something similar, ooh the possibilities…), but it works so well due to it’s sense of community and I worry about the effect of video hosting on that.

I’m a cynical old sod, and when I started to work on The Big Picture (a photography project that uses Flickr heavily) I was very worried about the potential amount of moderation I’d need to do. To date I can count on one hand the number of photos I’ve had to block from our project (and only one I think for decency) out of nearly 30,000 and that’s a tribute to both the people of the West Midlands and Flickr users. Contrast the mostly civilised debate in Flickr comments to the bile and spam to be found on YouTube, and you’ll see perhaps what is a little worrying.

Yahoo videos doesn’t seem to have any web traction (in fact I wasn’t sure it existed, until I just checked), so adding video to Flickr is a good move for them, as long as it doesn’t detract from what makes Flickr so good.

The 90 second rule is maybe the saving grace – there’s not much copyright material you can fit into a minute and a half, a trail, an ad, but not music vids or swathes of Dr Who - so Flickr may not draw much traffic away from other sites, more host short videos from its current user-base.

If it makes it easy to blog them (and so far it seems to work very much like the photo system), especially auto-blog perhaps from your phone then that’s another thing I’d be willing to trust Flickr will above most other sites. And here’s how the blogged vids look: