If you’ve spent significant time online, you have pile of names and passwords. Typically, one per domain, sometimes, it’s more than that. Each web service assuming it’s so god damn important in your life that it deserves a special password one more unmemorable than the next.

Highly rude, impolite, an unnecessary. Especially today when so many web services have interoperable APIs.

What do websites ask people to register instead of simply authenticate?
One reason is that ad-rates, valuations, and other finance-related metrics are based on the number of accounts (active or otherwise). Things unimportant to the people registering.

For Cullect.com, I needed some unique identifier. Something small to distinguish one person from another. As an added bonus, I’m betting the people in need of a powerful feed aggregator like Cullect are already publishing to some kind of API-enabled website already.

Cullect authenticates you against your own existing website(s). Easy. Like looking in the mirror.

No registration process. Just sign in. No need to create a new account or password. If you want to save yourself a step on the publishing side, Cullect can save your password. By default, it doesn’t.

For more background on this approach, check out my Guarding the Rhino post.

A couple days ago, Arik Jones – one of the early people in Cullect.com – deleted all his feeds and started over.

He dropped from ~50 feeds down to 4.

His dramatic shift got me thinking about the shared, collaborative, nature of Cullect.com and a notion I’ve been calling “reading through each other.”

Within Cullect, if a post (let’s call it ‘Commenting Post’) in a feed you subscribe to links to another post (‘Original Post’) from a feed you aren’t subscribed to, you can read ‘Original Post’ inline with ‘Commenting Post’ (instead of opening another tab or window).

That’s what I had originally deemed the ‘reading through’ notion.

Back to Arik.

Within Cullect, everyone’s reading list is public. Pick a number, any number. You don’t have to be a curator of that ‘Cullection’ to read. So, you could find a couple Cullections that have most of the feeds you like and some decent curators and drop all your overlapping feeds. Read the /recommended feeds from those Cullections, and start your own Cullection with just your unique feeds.

I don’t know if that’s what Arik did, but it’s not only another way to ‘read through’, but also a way to drive uniqueness in Cullections and save time in reading feeds. Both of which are exactly why I build Cullect.com

If you’ve been waiting to try it out, your first Cullection is now free. Just sign in and import your feeds.

Arik responds:

“I needed focus and I wanted to focus on a subject I do not know very much about….So thank you Cullect (and Garrick Van Buren) for making content comfortably consumable again.”

Excellent point Arik, it’s very easy to start a new Cullection, independent from your other feeds that focuses on a highly specific topic.