Today we have access to a river of data bombarding us from all angles. I used to send coworkers links via AIM or e-mail if I thought it was something that was useful for their job, a project we were working on, or if it was something I knew was of particular personal interest to that individual. That is fine but it’s a time consuming interruption for me and for them.

I decided to use some of the tools I have hanging around to streamline this flow of good information. The bulk of the links I wanted to share come in primarily via RSS feeds. Since I use Google Reader for all my feeds, and it has the ability to share posts, I thought this would be sufficient.

But it turns out that this solution isn’t ideal. Although I can share posts through my shared feeds url, I can’t tailor them for the different individuals I want to share with. Everything is rolled into this one feed and it’s up to them to sift through it. If you make it difficult it loses it’s value.

Instead, I decided to use del.icio.us because it gives me the ability to tag each item. So I tag an item with my company name if it would be of interest to the company or to an individual if I think it will be of interest to a specific person. Now all that has to happen is each person subscribes to the feed for the tags with their name and the one for the company and they get a highly tailored stream of interesting articles. The added bonus to this method is that if they ever want to revisit a link later, they can just go back to del.icio.us with their tag and find the link.

This is a good solution but a better solution, which I have yet to find, would enable me to add my friends list (like FaceBook), it would be my feed reader (like Google Reader), it would let me tag (like del.icio.us), but would add the ability for us to comment in a threaded way. If I only had the time this would be a great product to build. Basically it is what I was hoping Spokeo would morph into and with the latest changes they have made, who knows they might get there.  Maybe Digg or Propeller are closer to this but nothing I have found is right on yet.