The Joy of RSS

RSS feeds and me have a fairly well documented past. First there was RSSLibJ an open source project on Sourceforge, while everyone was hellbent on consuming RSS feeds in Java I was more bothered about writing them. Credit should really go to Joe Ottinger who coded the guts of the project together.

Big Pharma News

Next came BigPharmaNews in 2003/4 which collated pharma news feeds and did an email. This was pre Google News. It made some friends in some notable places and those friends are still firm ones to this day.

Curatic

Curatic came out of a personal need, I was trawling 30-40 RSS feeds for all the usual retail news, tech news and so on.  Leave it a couple of days and I’d have 1200+ stories that needed my attention. Thus followed an hour just marking everything as read even though I never gazed at it. The biggest sin was missing out on good content.  So Curatic does this for me…..

Curatic sends me an email every 3, 6, 12 or 24 hours with the story headlines and summary of what I want to read. My feeds and my phrases.  Nothing more, nothing less.

My first mention of it was during a conversation with Ben Hammersley at CultureTech last year. While my head was in retail loyalty, vouchers and barcodes there was always that niggle in the back of my mind that content curation would come in useful for me.

So I built Curatic. Now to set one thing straight. It’s not a startup, I’m not looking for funding and I’m not looking to make a fortune. I built it because I need it. That’s all.

Then Google Reader waved bye bye.

And we all did this…..

Surely it wasn’t that bad. Google have their reasons, it wasn’t a money make (and I don’t think RSS was ever going to be). Content summarisation has a place as Yahoo’s acquisition of Summly has proven.

While the market has flooded with apps to do lots of whizzy things. Flipboard’s lovely and so are a few others. But it’s not UI experience that I’m looking for, what I’m looking for are stories that I think I want to read and share.

That’s why I build Curatic, I built it for me.  If you want to have a go then you can add your name to the list and when it’s ready (no release date, it’s not a product remember :)) then you can use it.