My Trusty RSS Reader Now Has AI "Intelligence"

And what the heck is RSS?

Inoreader Intelligence

Inoreader is my trusty RSS reader. It’s a useful tool for me every day, and I use it as a web app on my Mac and on my Android phones. Which leads to the question What the heck is an RSS reader? For those of you who already know about these, use these, apologies - I feel like it’s worth a quick introduction because I have had so many occasions in a workplace or just out in the world where I mention RSS and people have no idea what I’m talking about.

I started to write up my own overview of RSS and RSS readers, but then I thought an AI friend might come up with a shorter, better rundown. Claude did that perfectly:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed technology that allows users to access updates from websites in a standardized format. It works as a subscription system for web content.

How RSS works:

• Websites publish their content as an RSS feed (an XML file)

• Users subscribe to these feeds through an RSS reader

• The reader automatically checks for and displays new content

RSS readers are applications that aggregate and display content from RSS feeds. They allow you to:

• Follow multiple websites in one place

• See new content without visiting each site

• Organize content by categories or topics

• Read content offline (in many readers)

Why is this useful?

TLDR: It’s a not so secret sauce that gives us the ability to discover, absorb, and make use of valuable information from far, far more sources than we can do without RSS readers. It’s those last four bullets above from Claude, on what RSS readers allow us to do.

Most of us spend too much time on the web (if you don’t, congrats) and have a number of favorite sites, sites that serve up the type of information we value most. The number of sites we follow increases dramatically as our interests expand, our job roles change, or for lots of other reasons. If you have, lets say, 20 sites that you find offer you the best information consistently, it’s difficult to impossible to visit each of those sites every day and spend time looking for new articles and seeing which interest you the most and you want to dive into. Depending on how broad your interests are, and/or what your job role is, you may well find you want to keep up with a lot more than 20 sites.

Right now, I follow (subscribe to the RSS feeds of):

• 19 sites that cover cybersecurity threat intel

• 15 that cover cybersecurity in general

• 12 that cover ICS (industrial control systems) security

• 4 that cover Android, 4 that cover PKM

• And more in miscellaneous other interest categories

Those first three total up to 46 sites that I follow for work related interest. Obviously I can’t visit all, or most, of those sites and look for useful posts every day, Or every other day. I can’t begin to keep up with them. Inoreader lets me get way closer to keeping up with them, and pretty much all the way there with the sites I consider most important to follow.

I’ve used several very good RSS readers over the years, and Inoreader matches up with or tops all of them. It offers a good default dashboard on the web app. You can also create your own dashboards. Here is a slice of mine for cyber threat intel and threat hunting feeds:

Inoreader dashboard

The Android app doesn’t have dashboards, but the UI is still quite nice.

Inoreader Android app

Inoreader lets you create rules - which I use to monitor for articles containing some specific cyber threat intel keywords - and filters, email digests, notifications, and use highlighters.

And just this week the new Intelligence feature appeared in the app. I’m not sure that it is “official” yet, because when I asked Perplexity and ChatGPT to tell me the release date of the feature they both found nothing. I have a Pro subscription, so maybe it’s an early beta. Either way, I was happy to see it, and happy to see the words “our first AI-powered feature” when it showed up in the web app.

I’ve been using it for a few days now. I like the customization options it offers, like prompts for its summaries, personalizing how you want to do the summaries (a la crafting your prompts with role, context etc in ChatGPT, Claude, and other chatbots).

It is not a world beater with its summaries. They’re decent, but not going to rival any of the leading chatbots. But hey, none of the chatbots can do much of anything much at all RSS wise. The Inoreader Intelligence summaries are good enough to be useful, and that’s a good start for their first week in the world.

Here are a couple example summaries:

How many of you use RSS readers? Anyone using Inoreader?