We are getting down to the end game for getting the Nightcrawler release of RSS Bandit. This is where all the more unfun parts of the release happen such as dealing with translations and tracking down performance bugs such as memory leaks or issues with multithreading. To take my mind of some of the tedium I'm going to have to deal with today, I've decided to spend some time thinking about the Jubilee release of RSS Bandit which should ship sometime next year

One of the features I'm evaluating is Reading lists for RSS which was discussed by Nick Bradbury in a blog entry he posted last month where he wrote

Last week Dave Winer proposed the idea of reading lists for RSS, which are more-or-less OPML subscriptions. I like this idea - a lot - and in fact a few FeedDemon customers have requested this feature in the past.

In a nutshell, the idea is that you'd subscribe to an OPML document which contains a list of feeds that someone is reading, some organization is recommending, or some service has generated (such as "Top 100" list). Changes to the source OPML document would be synchronized, so that you're automatically subscribed to feeds added to the reading list. Likewise, you'd be unsubscribed from feeds removed from the original OPML.

There are a number of implementation details that would need to be worked out (ex: would a FeedDemon user really want to be automatically unsubscribed from feeds dropped from the source OPML, especially if that user had flagged some posts in those feeds for future reference?), but details aside, I'm curious whether this is something you'd like to see, and if so, how do you think the idea can be improved upon?

This feature initially made me skeptical since it seems like a solution looking for a problem. Then again I thought the same thing about enclosures in RSS and I've been proved wrong by the podcasting phenomenom. So instead of ignoring the idea I'd like to see whether our users think this feature makes sense and if so how they expect us to resolve certain problems that would arise from implementing such a feature.

The first problem that comes up in implementing RSS reading lists based on OPML is what to do when a feed is pulled from the list by the owner of the feed list. Do we automatically delete the subscription? Do we prompt the user and if they decide to stay subscribed to the feed, move it out of the reading list? Another question is how to deal with feeds that the user is already subscribed to that are in the reading list?