aggravating aggregators

I’m a long-time user of bloglines, the web based news aggregator. It’s well thought out, works most of the time, and does what it promises: let’s me access the news feeds and blogs I’ve subscribed to. I’m a big fan of service based aggregators compared to client-side solutions, be it on the pc or a mobile; I want to be able to access my subscriptions from any connected computer or device. I’ve tried a couple of mobile news readers (I currently have a Nokia 9300 with a semi big screen that’s quite good for reading), but while they do provide a nice and working user interface, the fact that I don’t have my subscriptions at and hand makes them quite unusable in the long run. And yes, bloglines mobile solves this problem decently, but could certainly do a better job at it.

Since I started to use bloglines, I’ve been pretty happy with it and haven’t bothered with other services. So, I decided to check through other web based aggregation service offerings, both with eye for everyday pc usage as well as mobile features. What I realized came to me as a small surprise: there seems to be a certain lack of innovation in the whole space. Now this is weird, as said services are used to access huge amounts of aggregated information. Thats their reson d’etre. And I think there is still many things to be done.

Here’s my wish-list on 5 simple and quite basic things I’d like an aggregation service to have:

• Accessible and properly usable by any device/browser. Soon most of will be accessing the net through a phone, and accessibility is becoming an issue for increasingly many. Transcoding etc. on content could be quite hot?
• Mixing, matching and filtering of feeds. The blogosphere, if anything, has shown what information overload can be. I’d like to filter stuff from certain feeds, even on a keyword basis. Tags help on this one.
• Social tagging and rating (per feed and per post). Clear winner when combined with above feature. Socialmarks promises this, but I haven’t had an opportunity to try their service out.
• User definable folders where interesting posts can be stored. Some aggregators have this feature, and I could just as well use del.icio.us, but this is something I miss in bloglines.
• The web a platform, web 2.0, etc. Integration into user-definable web based services for expanded functionality, be it search, blogging or bookmarks.

I understand that some of the above don’t make sense business wise. Providing just an aggregation service cannot be to much of a money maker, so providers have to come up with added functionality that they tie their users to. But what if I prefer the blog search provided by technorati over the one provided by bloglines? Why can’t I add posts to del.icio.us directly from the aggregator? And nobody has had the guts to introduce an ad remover. In the current world, the user should be able to choose (and that’s why greasemonkey is popular, I guess – it lets users augment services with custom/alternating functionality).

Almost all aggregators I tried have the functionality to import and export subs through OPML. This means that there is no customer lock-in or switching costs involved when changing from one aggregator to another. I believe there still is space in the whole aggregation service space for a quality service that can innovate to the benefit of the user. It will be interesting to see what will surface.

Update: Didn’t take long before google released their reader. It seems targeted at not-so-rss-savvy users, and somehow I didn’t find it as usable as bloglines. Probably old habits…