Filtering RSS feeds

My friend Jason asked me recently if there was a way to filter RSS feeds for keywords or phrases. I hadn’t really thought about it, but with the +150 feeds I have coming into my NetVibes account (a number which has gone up since we launched Analyst’s Edge) I was interested to learn if something good was out there.

The first products I found were Feed Rinse and Feedshake. Both look nice and gooey – web 2.0 colors and round corners. The problem doesn’t seem that difficult (rss feeds + filter words/phrases = new rss feed) when I saw that Electric Pulp (the same guys that charged Guy Kawasaki +$12,000 for Truemors) runs Feed Rinse, I figured they would have an easy, clear solution.

I was wrong. Feed Rinse is not good. I spent 30 minutes trying figure out what difference is between filtering a feed and filtering a channel and whether they support boolean searching type stuff. When I finally thought I had something configured, I went to create a new “rinsed” feed and discovered that they create OPML files, not new feeds….OK shouldn’t be a problem…I can import OPML files into my NetVibes account. But not Feed Rinse files. After 10 more minutes I found the feeds were importing into random pages and weren’t filtering for the keywords I specified. Granted, this may have been NetVibes’ fault, but either way, it didn’t work.

On to Feedshake. On it’s surface, Feedshake is less snazzy than Feed Rinse, but I was optimistic when I started configuring the feeds to be filtered. The process was more straightforward than Feed Rinse and there was no confusion between channel or feed filters. Plus, Feedshake produced new feeds for me to subscribe to, which I liked…until I tried to subscribe to the feeds and found they were broken.

This sent me back to the drawing board. I figured since Netvibes makes a business of handing feeds, they might have a feed customization/filtering feature. Turns out they do, but it doesn’t create new feeds – the NetVibes search feature filters feeds you have subscribed to for specific keywords. This solves the problem – I’ll now subscribe to all of the feeds that I want to filter in one tab and then run filters on the tab daily. I’ll be running the same filters every day (“hedge fund”, “private equity”, etc.) which will get repetitive, so a feature that created a new feed would be a bit better, but at least I know this works and I don’t have to worry about anything other than NetVibes going down. Note that to use this feature, you need to go to “Settings” within your NetVibes account and select “Display search area”.

It’s surprising that there isn’t a functioning, easy to use solution for what seems to be a straightforward problem, although it’s not surprising that NetVibes has the best fix.