Interesting post and thread! I've had similar ideas myself for some time now. Here are a few: * Just like you point out in the article, there's almost always too little time for reading blogs. It'd be great to have a slider in the reader that says something like 'read for 5 min - 15 min – 30 min – 1 hour' with articles being filtered according to a social algorithm as one moves the slider. * Interesting comments by Kevin on the algorithm+UI issues. Good question whether the app should feature advanced mail-style filters (but with options such as: 'has been bookmarked on del.icio.us (etc) more than X times', 'has been read/commented on by my friends', 'is by friend', etc, or whether the algorithm should be opaque, e.g. some smart, weighted combination of global popular+local+friends posts. * One UI idea I like in some collaborative filters in music services is the slider 'niche - mainstream'. * In general, it'd be nice to have a reader that is not 'live' in the sense that it does some processing/evalutation on posts before it shows them to the reader. in the UI, 'un-interesting' posts could simply be greyed out. interesting posts could be color-coded from hot to cold. again, nice post. i'll comment here again if I get the time to do a mock or so.