@J. Phil, My thinking is everything in moderation. I cannot process information that quickly, so hand picked feeds works much better for me. FriendFeed has hiding for filtering, so it works from that perspective. For GReader shares, getting all of my FF subscriptions’ shares would be far too many.

My knee-jerk reaction was to ignore my shared items and concentrate on keeping up with my feeds. But your post is a reminder that I need to attend to this ‘overgrown’ part of my social media garden. I need to look more closely at Feedly and see if it has more fine-grained control of friend’s shared items.

However, before Feedly I definitely read and re-shared a lot of your shared items!

I agree. Perhaps this is an idealistic fool’s view, but perhaps a large part of the problem is the average online consumer’s severe lack of understanding of the technologies they use. That, of course, is treatable, but sadly, ignorance is not.

I would love for someone to come up with a good solution to the problem. You can do some really interesting things with Yahoo Pipes, but it is definitely for us technical types.

Personally I subscribe to friends’ shared feeds and then process them with some local scripts, but Yahoo pipes (on the shared feeds) also does the job rather well. It is therefore possible to cut down your feeds (which are already targeted) even more, to the point where it becomes possible to cover information relevant to you in a very short amount of time.

I still use reader, but my days of spending 4-6 hours a day filtering content are over!

@Joey, good to see an STJer here. I had switched from bloglines earlier this year, and I will never go back.