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Question: Would You consider this a good standard for a quality system?

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Paul Keith:
I'm thinking of verifying the effectiveness of a productivity system by subjecting it to RSS feeds?

Now before you guys say this is pretty much what you do with Inbox Zero-ing, this is the quote that inspired my thought:

As a college student, I "like" something because I get something out of it. For example, I "like" a design site so that I can get updates in my newsfeed, much like an RSS feed. I also "like" a shopping site because I got a coupon code, but I then immediately unliked it, because I got what I wanted out of that transaction.

Because of this transaction taking place, I've always viewed "like" as a bit of a misnomer. While "likes" are (usually) a good indication of popularity, I don't think it's supposed to hold any indication of quality. Perhaps it's like Google in this regard - often, people see a top result as being a good quality site, when really it just means it has bunch of links. While links often do mean quality, they don't have to.

I'm also interested in this from a marketing standpoint. I recently started work at an ecommerce site, and we regularly do goofy things to get you "like" us. We'll do coupon codes mainly, but also free stuff and a few other random things. We're doing this not for the "likes", per se, but rather for the relationship that creates. Once you "like" us, you see our updates, and that's just as good as paying for an ad on the side of Facebook. Next time you need $product, you're already thinking of us.


Honestly, besides seeing "like" as a misnomer, I've really seen it as a kind of newspeak, and I guess it's working. I don't actually like Blockbuster Express all that much, but I'll certainly "like" it for a free rental. All of a sudden though that relationship has been co-opted into a positive endorsement, which certainly isn't my intention in getting a coupon code. Maybe we just need a greasemonkey script to replace "like" with "connected".
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I'm not talking about manually hiding and shifting RSS feeds into folders or tags.

I mean a system where I basically have this massive RSS feed - organize them - read them all - and catch up to the latest articles.

Sort of like a race where the unread RSS feeds gets a head start and you have to sprint and then catch up until a certain set is down to zero. Would you consider that a good barometer for a good productivity system or is it inherently flawed because tons of systems do that already or tons of tasks require more strategic thinking compared to just reading and marking something as read?

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