Being a big fan of RSS feeds and having information in the “cloud”, I’m a perpetual Google Reader user.

I think the latest Google Reader enhancement of offering a place to comment on shared items and respond back creates an interesting and educational dialogue between friends.

It’s like a mini-FriendFeed except your friends don’t have to sign up for a new service. They don’t have to do anything they don’t normally do, other than click the “Share” button on items.

My only point is, I want more friends on Google Reader.

I like reading what my friends are reading. I may skim or ignore some stuff, but as I said (via Google Reader comments) recently, seeing/reading what people share is a window into how they think.

Also, since I tend to over index on tech news, it is always good to read about other topics that my friends find important.

Today, I read a short post along these lines on inessential.com. I completely agree with the following statement:

I’d rather hear what any of my friends says on any topic, rather than what people I don’t know say about a specific article. And I think that’s more and more true for more people, now that we’ve all seen what on-site comments are like, and how they’re getting worse.

Inessential.com isn’t a blog I subscribe to. How did I come across this post? Was I trying to find more friends via Google?

No. Louis Gray’s Shared Items feed. I don’t know Louis Gray personally, but he is a prolific sharer (is that a word?) and happens to consume a lot of information I find intriguing.

You know what I would find even more fascinating?

Anything shared by someone I know in real life.

Recently, I put up a forum for our couples small group.

Most people wanted a way to communicate without overloading inboxes with replies to all. Let’s assume for the sake of this post that we want a private community. I thought of a few options for mass communication:

• Private Facebook group (which we already had)
• Google Group
• Private FriendFeed room(s)
• Private Forum

The shortcomings of the Facebook group was that it doesn’t send notifications out about new posts in groups, or at least private groups. No RSS feed to speak off (typical Facebook). I will admit I do not know everything about Facebook.

A Google Group wasn’t a bad idea, but Google will still index and own your life. Although I’m not totally familiar with Google Groups either, it seemed like a Forum would give us more control and options (but require more maintenance).

I really (really!) liked the idea of a private FriendFeed room. It has an RSS feed, although comments made on posts after the RSS post is pushed don’t make it into the feed. That means people would actually have to go to the site. Also, one room might contain several different main topics (events, general commentary, study ideas, etc.). We could make more than one room, then aggregate them all in a “master” room. That would give people the option to pick and choose which rooms (topics) they follow or all of it.
But, asking people to sign up for another online service coupled with the unfamiliarity of life streaming took it out of the running.

So, we are back to the forum. I chose Simple Machine Forums, due to my slight previous experience and that it was easier to integrate mods. I set up the boards, usernames/passwords, theme, options and thought we were set. Then I realized the whole reason for creating this (better notifications via RSS) didn’t work. RSS on private forums don’t work. A major reason for this is the lack of support from web readers (Google Reader) for private feeds. Another being it can be insecure based on the authentication method (cookie, login/password, unique key).

I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

After exhausting the Google looking for mods for SMF or other forum packages that supported private RSS, I started to focus on using what was available. Most forum software will send out e-mail notifications for new topics and replies. I figured I would use those e-mails to create RSS feeds via some sort of e-mail to RSS gateway. The two that seemed to work were mailbucket.org and email2rss.com. Ultimately, since email2rss doesn’t parse the text properly, mailbucket worked better.

Two issues:

1. SMF doesn’t send out notifications for replies on monitored forums. It will only send out notifications of replies on threads the user specifies. To create the full feed, I would have to individually monitor every post. That’s not going to happen.
2. Would Google index these not so private RSS feeds? Would a spider crawl a mailbucket or email2rss xml? This would be slight problem. I don’t really want our private posts to show up in Google search results.

I’ve searched for an open source email to rss gateway I could use either on a hosting account or a computer at home. So far, no luck.

Maybe other forum software sends out notifications on all replies on boards without manual intervention of each thread. I’ll try phpBB next.

Open source RSS reader that accepts e-mails and turns them into feeds? Something else?

If anyone has any suggestions, I would appreciate it. I’m trying to think outside of the box, but so far I haven’t been able to solve my problem.

Most college students, especially business majors, are forced to learn common techniques, software applications, and etiquette used in the real world. While even liberal arts majors have to use PowerPoint every once and a while, it seems few are schooled in simple e-mail techniques.

What I don’t understand is rampant use of the “Reply To All” button.

As if I was looking for an example, just this morning I was on a random e-mail from a former rugby teammate inviting people to a pool side BBQ this weekend. Out of the 48 people on the list, I only know a few. Nine minutes later, some chick decides to let everyone know that she can’t make it because she will “be in FL, exploring discovery cove”.

Why? Why tell everyone? Do people realize there might be folks that just don’t care?

Four replies to all later, that same chick said:

hurry, hurry, get back to facebook! there might be updates on your minifeed!

One reply to all can be slightly annoying, but it may open the flood gates for more.

There are times when replying to all is the appropriate thing to do. Occasionally, an e-mail is sent out to a small group of friends that may go back and forth many times. While this may not be the ideal way to have a conversation, many are unwilling to use various other more efficient forms of group communication.

I am guilty of sending out a few group e-mails a day (mainly to the villagers). If they don’t want to receive spam from me, all they have to do is ask. Otherwise, everyone is comfortable receiving group messages about various topics.

Perhaps there needs to be a “Reply to Some” button in e-mail clients/web apps. It would provide an easy interface (e.g. checkboxes) to reply to the author and a few select others that may care to hear about your spelunking in geriatric land.

I’m not saying it is a more efficient way to e-mail, but maybe less annoying for the majority. Gmail users can apply the “Mute” function to such e-mails. The rest of you are stuck hearing random people’s uninvited thoughts.