Anyone with an interest in competitive knowledge work should be aware of and give some thought to these applications. We'd love to hear your thoughts on others in comments below, too, readers. I've put the following 10 in a particular order: from the most geeky to the most mainstream.

Fabien Penso's fabulous iPhone push notification app released a 3.0 version this year, but it's just the nice clean basics that make this one a winner. Input any feed, or many other sources of information, and Penso's app will push it to your phone in real time. It works really, really well and is better than ever with the introduction of the Apple Notification Center in iOS5. A double digit percentage of the stories I reported on this year came from feeds I consumed in this app. See also: BoxCar and Notifo.

9. iftt

If This Then That is a point and click mashup maker that lets you do all kinds of things with feeds of information and multiple applications. It's loads of fun, though some high-volume RSS feeds seem to overwhelm it. I wish it worked with AppNotifications above, or UrbanAirship. The ifttt recipe that pushes my Foursquare check-ins into my Google Calendar like a diary entry? That's awesome. Ifttt was recently funded by Betaworks, a story I was able to break because of another awesome feed bot - the Neubot VC portfolio tracker.

8. Flipboard

The feed reader your parents always wished you'd bring home, Flipboard finally released its iPhone version this Fall after more than a year of dominating the iPad magazine reader app market. Competitor Zite is nice and was acquired by CNN, Google's new Currents is ok, Yahoo's competitor is not so great and others are floating around too. Flipboard puts a premium on design though and wins as a result. Adoption of its new iPhone app has been breathtaking. The best way to enjoy Flipboard, though, is to populate it with a great Twitter list.

7. Summify

The computer science nerds behind iPhone app Summify have done a great job combining social engineering, smart algorithms and nice design to solve the information overload problem. If you haven't seen Summify, you should check it out. It feels related to the iPad's News.me, which is a strong contender for this spot in the list as well.

6. Path

The story behind Path seems downright smug - the company's founders reportedly turned down $100 million from Google before even launching and they walk through the wasteland of social networking healing the sick with their mere touch, but the latest version of the app is undeniably fantastic. It's like Facebook Mobile meets Instagram meets Foursquare meets Gowalla meets better design than any of the above. Expect to see a giant pile of apps try to model their design after Path's in the next year. It's a great presentation of an activity feed. It's the kind of thing that nerds and noobs can all love, too.

5. Percolate

"Percolate turns brands into curators," this new startup says. Marketers love this service and it seems to have done a great job of discovering feeds full of content and making them easy for Percolate users to add to and capture value from.

4. Feedly

Feedly rides on top of your Google Reader subscriptions and provides a great cross-platform feed reading experience on web, mobile and tablets. When you're ready to stop messing around with filters, social, recommendations, etc. and you just want to stand in front of a pipe of feeds you subscribed to yourself, Feedly is a great way to do it. (Disclosure: The author did a small amount of consulting for Feedly on launch strategy but has no ongoing financial interest in the company, beyond a glowing endorsement of said consulting services. Sorry, but it's still a feed app that lots of people love.)

3. New Twitter Interactions

Love or hate the #newnewTwitter just launched at the end of this year, the new Interactions tab on web and mobile is a great big nod to activity feeds. It's very cool to see all the relevant activity surfaced with regard to your content: you've been replied to, favorited, added to a list, retweeted. Putting all of that in one big feed is really nice and is probably one of the biggest feed changes that tens of millions of people are going to engage with next year. That will make it one of the biggest, except for...

2. The Facebook Timeline

Facebook's new Timeline feature looks at all the activities you've published into the site since creating your account and it surfaces the highlights by analyzing social activity around each event. It's awesome, if a little frightening. Now that hundreds of millions of people will become familiar with this kind of presentation around their data, they'll be all the more ready for...

1. Facebook Seamless Sharing

The biggest thing in feeds for 2011 is clearly Facebook's Seamless Sharing, or Open Graph Protocol. I think the way the company implemented the paradigm is risky, irresponsible and wrong. But it's going to pave the way for a wholly instrumented world. Today the music you listen to is streamed into your social network and profile (unless you opt-out) and in the future almost everything else you do with a machine will be, too. Every machine you use will be network-connected and will publish data onto the web. Remember when Facebook hired "my year in review" infographic artists Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case this Spring? Their work appeared in the aforementioned Facebook Timeline, but they and their thinking will help build dashboards we use to track our home electricity usage, our debit card activity, our exercise, our travel and a whole lot more in the future. It will all be pushed automatically into the network too, just like Facebook's Seamless Sharing.

Hopefully Facebook can move this ball forward in a way that allows users to make clear, informed decisions how to participate - odds of that aren't great - but either way it's likely to happen. And it's going to be very big.

Those are my list of the Top 10 Feed Technologies in 2011 - what do you think? What should be included? Is there too much Facebook here? Please share your comments below.

Disclosure: The author is building an unlaunched startup related to this sector; it may either compete or collaborate with any number of the above companies. Except Facebook, it doesn't have anything to do with Facebook.

You could also call it the sterilization of the social web. Just like today's new Twitter redesign it makes things nice and pretty for non-technical users. Google Currents is infinitely friendlier and more accessible than any RSS reader, even Google's own Reader. Unfortunately, in the current application that ease of use comes at a great cost: Google Currents does away with many of the best parts of the social web. It sings a catchy tune, but there's far less life inside the experience. It's not just a bummer, either - it's a threat to what's great about blogging.

Google Currents doesn't let you do that. If you've got a Google Reader account from the hard old days you can add one subscription at a time to Currents, but if you discover something new out on the web at large, clicking the RSS icon does nothing. It's like an empty smile - not a portal into a world of potential learning and fun, just a dead link. It's a violation of an important universal law to kill an RSS link, but that's what Google Currents has done. Those feeds, promises of new relationships easily entered into so easily, were awfully messy anyway weren't they? Surely you'd prefer one of the recommended feeds within the safe confines of the Currents interface.

Those untamed pioneers who subscribed to RSS feeds in a feed reader (and shaved their face with a wagon wheel) sometimes swam in what was called a river of news. A River of News is a beautiful thing. Let's say you were reading the fabulous group blog on humanities Crooked Timber (one of my early favorite blogs and still going strong!) and you looked at the sidebar of the page. There you'd find what was called a Blogroll, where bloggers would link freely to other blogs that they liked. There is no place for such frivolity in Google Currents, of course, you will read the stripped down primary content and nothing else.

You cannot do that in Google Currents.

Maybe in your feed reader you'd put all those Humanities blogs in a folder titled "Humanities." Maybe you'd click around and discover other blogs about finance, Argentina, old movies, new movies, fast cars, loud-talking women - whatever the case was, one blog would link to another blog and another and you could, with a click, fill up your universe with birds of many feathers.

Then you could open up your feed reader and say "Universe! Show me the latest deep thoughts from the world of finance! From my favorite sources on Argentina! From five loud-talking women I've never met but have grown to love because I never fail to receive their latest blog posts inside my precious feed reader!"

Maybe that day you'd meet a new one and you'd subscribe.

Then one day you'd read an article inside a feed that made you want to post a comment. You'd click through to the web page and you'd pour out your thoughts and feelings. And you'd read the considered perspectives of other people from all around the world who posted comments.

Not in Google Currents you don't. At least when reading the approved sources (called "Editions") you cannot click through to the websites the articles have come from. You cannot read comments, you cannot post comments, you can only swipe fruitlessly at your iPad wishing you could find a place to engage in the community that is a blog but instead finding that another discussion-free article from the same source has slid into your field of vision. You might feel disoriented, you might feel alone, you might feel like someone who grew up in a broadcast media world who once was no longer rendered silent and alone but who now is so again. You might cry a little, or start to scream for help. (I wouldn't blame you.)

You might try to bookmark an article with Delicious, but you cannot. There is only Pinboard. You might see the section titled "User Generated" and run there with high hopes. But you'll find that it's just a bunch of professionally produced video content posted to a site cynically named "You Tube."

Back in the old days, all that clicking around, free subscribing, commenting and reading comments - that was the stuff that gave new little blogs a reason to live. You could have ten readers and if they posted comments and new people came around sometimes and sometimes stayed - that is like the breath of life for new bloggers. Take that away from them and just put the best big blogs in a pretty box and what have you got? The death of blogging is what you've got. You've got some bloggers like me today who will have thousands of silent readers enjoying this blog on their iPads - but you won't have as many bloggers like me 7 years ago, finding my first small communities online in the network of independent blogs and their comments. That means fewer voices, less diversity, less discourse and democracy, less vigorous debate, less defense of and dignity for the formerly voiceless.

It's not all bad, of course. When you look at a trending topic there is an "About" tab, offering up expository content about current events. It's a much friendlier way to read content than RSS readers, which for some sad reason scared away most of the world.

I've got some respect for Justin Bieber - I watched his movie in 3D and learned that he's a seriously talented musician. When someone dulls their capabilities in order to reach a larger audience, though, you have to wonder what that means for the message that could have been communicated by full-throated exploration of what's really possible.

It is awfully clean looking though, isn't it?

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is one of many launch partners of Google Currents.

One of those disappointed users was Web developer Emmanuel Pire. Not content to see the beloved sharing feature go away, Pire built a replica of it on his own server and wrote a script that adds a "Share" button to the new Google Reader interface. This workaround doesn't restore the functionality 100%, but it comes pretty close.

Finally, it's worth noting that the following instructions will not restore the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet or the "Share with note" button. For many users, the back-and-forth comments on shared items was a central part of the social experience. That's still missing, but the sharing part can be restored. It actually works quite well.

How to Get the "Share" Button back

To restore the "share" button in Google Reader, follow these steps:

1. Go to this page using Chrome or Firefox and hit the green "Install" button in the upper right. (You'll need to have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox first.)
2. Go to Google Reader. You should now see a "Share" button in the upper right (not where it used to be, but this'll do). There's also a box in the left column that lets you add friends. Note: This feature will only work if your friends also install the script.
3. Click on the "Share" button in the upper right (you may need to have an item open to see the button). You'll be asked to set a password and confirm your email address. Do both of these things.
4. Email your old Google Reader friends and excitedly ask them to join you. They'll all need to install the script and follow these steps as well. You might as well just send them a link to this article.
5. Once everyone is signed up, you can search for them in the "Add friends by email" box on the left. If they're taking their sweet time, you can bug them via email from this box as well.
6. As you find and subscribe to people, you may want to add them all to a folder. Create a new folder called "Friends" or "Shared Items" and be sure to put everybody's feeds in there.
7. Use Google Reader just as you used to, hitting the new "Share" button each time you come across something you'd like your friends to see.

Again, this workaround only brings things about 90% back to normal. Some things, like building an inline commenting feature, are a bit trickier for a third party developer to implement. As an alternative, you can always hit the "+1" button to publicly share it or you can hit the "Share" button to send the item to your newly-resurrected Google Reader network.

So how does this work? Pire realized that the old sharing feature was essentially a glorified RSS feed to which others could subscribe. His hack generates a feed containing any item on which you click "Share" and then allows your friends to subscribe to that feed. He requires users to set a password so that others can't inject items and effectively share them on your behalf.

We tried it out with a few of our old Reader pals and it comes pretty close to replicating the original functionality. Give it a try and lets us know in the comments what you think.

Feedly has also gotten more social. Previous versions had buggy sharing features, but those have been fixed, and today's release also adds Google Plus integration. Finally, the new features all sync across platforms, between the plug-ins for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and the mobile apps for phones and tablets.

Feedly is not a social reader like Flipboard. It promotes its own topical "essentials," which are curated and well worth exploring, and then it pulls from Google Reader and rearranges the content, although today's update lets you add your Tumblr feed as well. But it offers an engrossing reading experience, and the sharing features make it easy to show articles to friends. Best of all, even though it's a free app, there's almost no intrusion into the minimal interface, since promoted content is Feedly's main revenue stream.

Check out the Feedly team's video on ways to customize your reading experience:

You can get Feedly for your platform of choice from the splash page on feedly.com.

What apps do you use to read your feeds? Share your favorites in the comments.

Glassboard launched in the iTunes, Android and Windows Phone app stores this morning and it's a good, solid, simple app for communicating across multiple different topical "boards" on your phone. If you've got a group of people you want to communicate with for a short or long period of time, from your phone, with commenting, media and location sharing, then Glassboard could be the app for you.

The team behind Glassboard includes RSS veterans NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons, FeedDemon creator Nick Bradbury and Newsgator's VP of Mobile and Data Walker Fenton. When social media was first bursting onto the scene with the self-publishing power of the first blogging platforms, it was RSS innovators like Simmons, Bradbury and Fenton, along with Google Reader leaders Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell (now both at AOL) that really made blogging scale by building the web apps that let millions of people subscribe easily to tens or hundreds of millions of blogs.

Sadly, listening meaningfully to other people will never be as popular as babbling about yourself or drooling, so RSS reading applications didn't explode like subsequent technologies have. They have changed the lives of millions of people, though, and continue to power important work behind the scenes throughout a still-democratizing media world.

These days it's Group Messaging that's hot though, and it's surely more accessible than RSS. As I wrote when previewing the Glassboard app earlier this Summer:

"It is built with Microsoft Azure as its back-end and will integrate with Microsoft's forthcoming Office 365. The team is being intentionally 'agnostic' about its target market, saying it could be used by families, work teams or companies and their clients. These guys have built some incredible things in the past and it will be very interesting to see what they can bring to one of the biggest potential markets of the day."

The app is now live and in limited testing, I've been impressed with it so far. It reminds me a lot of Beluga, the group messaging client scooped up by Facebook this Spring, except it's better set up for small groups of people you already know than it is big public group chatter like Beluga is sometimes used for. One of the differentiators is that Glassboard uses the News Feed model to display activity updates from all your different group conversations.

Clearly Skype and Microsoft think that mobile group messaging is going to be an important part of the tech landscape of the future. Glassboard is a solid entrant into that market, led by a very high-caliber team.

Why Group Messaging Matters

As David Card, Research Director at GigaOM Pro, wrote this Spring:

"Synchronous communications (such as mobile group chat) are the latest battleground in the war over unified communications, but no matter how clever and fun those apps are, they're not the real contenders. Rather, technology platform players like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are fighting to see what company supplies a user's communications control panel - and a scrappy Skype can't be ignored either."

Why are these apps so hot right now? I think it's in part because they capture the same feeling that one to one SMS and MMS capture, but on a whole new level with multiple people. It's a paradigm that's both simple and highly engaging.

Om Malik wrote in February that good group messaging apps could hold the key to Google effectively challenging Facebook in social technology. Their synchronous Interactions are "highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it's photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical."

That described Glassboard well, too; and so far the app looks like a clean, simple, fast way to accomplish those goals that are common among group messaging apps.

TrapIt begins to open up its next-generation newsreader today (the first 500 people to visit this link can try it out for themselves) and I've been testing it this afternoon. My verdict so far? It's attractive, the user experience is pretty good, it seems like its smarts could deliver some meaningful value with ongoing use - but like so many newsreading services trying to go mainstream, the quantity of news it delivers is just too small.

The service scours the web to identify possible sources of information, an average of 5,000 sources are indexed each day the company says, then it throws out 80% of what it finds in a quality control process that concludes with human editorial judgement. The service looks through updates from a total of fifty thousand sources daily.

TrapIt says it uses a cocktail of algorithms to personalize, de-duplicate and deliver the key stories each day. The company says it's working on accessibility today and will shift its focus to features better suited to power users next. But does one have to be a power user before objecting to an online news product that only delivered me 6 stories over 2 days on a topic as broad as "fine art"? It did better to find me 7 stories on the subject of Twitter today. But only 9 stories over the last 3 weeks on my hometown of Portland, Oregon?

These aren't particularly fabulous stories, either. I asked the company how it determined both relevance and quality and the TrapIt team seemed to argue that relevance is the only thing that can really be determined - because one person's low quality story is another person's high quality story. Maybe. But the company said that at least one of its competitors delivered little more than "Google News keyword search in a tiled visual interface" - it's not readily apparent to me how different all the technology behind TrapIt is from the same thing in the end, except that it delivers a more narrow stream of results. At first, at least though, they seem pretty arbitrary.

Perhaps my problem is that my interests are too obscure. Perhaps I shouldn't use TrapIt to try to track interests like Ceramics, OPML (seriously, that's just not fair) and Portland, Oregon. Maybe I should be using it to track news about vampires, robots, TV and GOP Presidential hopefuls (the recommended topics). Except I don't want to do that, and I thought I was going to get personalized content.

I'll keep trying TrapIt a little while longer, though. The user experience is pretty good, but for a few little bugs, and the problem space being tackled here is very interesting. Give it a shot and let me know what you think, readers.

Glassboard, which will open to the public next month, will allow iOS and Android users to share text, photos and in some cases location with small groups. It is built with Microsoft Azure as its back-end and will integrate with Microsoft's forthcoming Office 365. The team is being intentionally "agnostic" about its target market, saying it could be used by families, work teams or companies and their clients. These guys have built some incredible things in the past and it will be very interesting to see what they can bring to one of the biggest potential markets of the day.

Past Performance...

Success in social software 1.0 does not always mean that subsequent projects will be winners, too. More than a year ago we wrote here about the latest creation of mega-successful social software entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, creator of Yahoo Groups and Newsgator competitor Bloglines. A year ago he launched a service called SnapGroups, which I said was well aimed at one of the key trends of our time: real-time group communication.

SnapGroups is now nowhere to be found: offline, no Tweets, no blog posts, nothing. It was a cool little service it just didn't seem to have wings. "It just never caught on," Fletcher told me today. "In hindsight, I maybe should have focused on mobile, but that space got crowded quick, so who knows." So it goes sometimes, even for some of the smartest and most innovative people online.
Glassboard will use a freemium model, will be available for consumers and enterprises and isn't talking about its business model yet.

Was this group's work on RSS readers a failure? Newsgator's CEO J.B. Holston says the company's RSS apps, most of which have now been sold-off to smaller companies that are enthusiastic about developing them further, may not have turned into Twitter but they did change the web and a lot of peoples' lives.

My take on it is this, and I'll try to say this without getting too upset about it: the lack of uptake of RSS reading software by consumers and businesses is among the turns of events in recent technology history that's most disparaging of the state of humanity. That a personalized, centralized repository for updates from dynamic streams of information delivered by free trusted sources of democratic publishing all over the world has had its tech-lunch eaten by mind-rotting casual Flash games on Facebook is as depressing as the way that public education dreams were dashed when the promise of television became its reality. It's like the psychedelic dreams of Harvard's Dr. Timothy Leary becoming the wretched, heartbreaking narcotic drama of the TV show The Wire. It's terrible. It's reason to pack it all up and go home.

But that's not what the team of RSS reader forefathers are doing. Instead they are getting the band back together again and tackling the next frontier. It will be exciting to see what they come up with.

Users interested in subscribing to updates from a website itself can, as always, subscribe to the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds offered by many sites for years. Those are the orange buttons with the little white lines on them, and without the word Subscribe. RSS requires the use of a different application, called an RSS reader, where a user is probably less likely to encounter poorly written little jokes or the daily ennui of Hollywood starlets. Or your mom, who is more likely to Tweet than knowingly publish an RSS feed.

But now, one developer has taken it upon himself to build a tool that uses Twitter's API (application programming interface) to create RSS feeds. The code, called "Twitter API 2 RSS," is now available on GitHub here.

According to Stay's earlier post, Twitter has been moving away from RSS for some time. Last year, Twitter developer Isaac Hepworth told Stay that only hyperlinks to RSS feeds were being removed from Twitter profile pages, but links to the RSS in the Twitter metadata would remain. Their temporary removed was "accidental," Hepworth had said, and would be fixed soon.

But Stay says the problem was never fixed, and he could not find any evidence of RSS in the HTML source, either. This lead him to conclude that Twitter had indeed killed off all support for the technology. An article in Twitter's Help section confirmed this, saying: "we no longer directly support RSS feeds on Twitter."

As Stay noted at the time, developers could access RSS through Twitter's API, which may be the last recourse for getting an RSS feed from Twitter's website, outside of third-party services.

Twitter API 2 RSS

Now another developer, Shawn McCollum, has done just that. Twitter API 2 RSS, available as a code snippet (aka a "gist" on GitHub), is now ready for testing, he says. The code was originally written for personal use when he wanted to build his own better-looking and more functional RSS feeds for Twitter profiles.

After McCollum heard that Twitter was removing RSS support, he realized that the same code could be retooled for use by others. The only problem now is that he does not know how to get past Twitter's API limit of 150 calls per hour from a single IP address. He's looking for ideas to help with that, if you want to pitch in.

In the meantime, technical users can host their own copy of Twitter API 2 RSS and then subscribe to the resulting feeds in Google Reader or any other RSS reader application. However, the code is not yet available as a service for end users at this time. Details on how to use the code are available here on McCollum's blog.

Here's what it looks like, in action:

RSS dead? Hardly.

Blekko, while perhaps a less well-known startup, is an alternative search engine that uses human editors to aid in the elimination of spam from search results. It also allows you to curate your own personalized, customized mini-search engines featuring content you curate yourself. (Note: We recently looked at this process in a post titled "How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job.")

Earlier this year, the startup announced that it's using Facebook "likes" to help create personalized search experiences, where users can see whether or not any of their Facebook friends liked particular search results. This is similar to the functionality Microsoft's Bing search engine just announced yesterday.

Within Flipboard, however, blekko is providing the social magazine with access to its RSS feeds via a specially developed API (application programming interface), which offers a programmatic way for Flipboard to access Blekko's content.

This isn't Flipboard's first RSS feed integration, either. In December, the magazine added support for Google Reader, but, of course, this assumed that an end user was already using RSS feeds and had a collection of feeds ready for import. With Blekko, users don't need to understand RSS technology, they only need to know what content they would like to see and perform a simple search.

The blekko integration is live now in Flipboard's iPad app.

Feedly has been around for a while. As a browser extension to Chrome and Firefox, Feedly has been taking RSS feeds and Google Reader and turning them into a smart magazine start page since 2008. It made things simple and elegant and easy to navigate. The new mobile version of the mobile application attempts to bring that same functionality to your devices.

The layout of the app is simple. There is a small black bar on the bottom of the app that can control anything you want within the reader. You can Like, tweet, email, search directly from the app, copy article links or open in a browser from the bottom bar. One good function that we liked a lot was the inclusion of a button that will save articles to Instapaper or Read It Later. The tweet button has an automatic URL shortener, powered by Bit.ly.

In terms of user interface, Feedly for the iPad (where we tested it) has two choices - white background, black text or black background, white text. The ability to choose between on or the other is smart on Feedly's part. I prefer white text on black and found that the app was more enjoyable as a reader if I had the choice. You can scroll through articles from a source one by one with a swipe or through feeds on the browser page. One drawback is that the app is meant to run only in portrait mode which means if you are using it on a tablet you will not be able to use the standup option on your case.

Feedly is not going to run into any problems with publishers, the way Zite has. Since it is an RSS reader, it can bring in the ad stream of a blog or publisher through a partnership program the company has set up. In testing, multiple times we saw an ad spot within the reader that says "If you own this blog, contact us to enable your ad stream." Articles are rendered within the app with ads enabled and Feedly has held to the wishes of publishers who want their articles read in "web-only" mode.

Feedly may not be the most innovative or dynamic magazine application on the market. Flipboard is the leader in the category, Zite and Pulse both to fantastic apps in the mobile realm. In terms of functionality, simplicity and elegance, the Feedly reader can compete with anyone.

The app, which sells for $2.99, offers an attractive folder-based navigation that's easy to thumb through horizontally. Sharing, bookmarking, Tweeting and emailing are all very easy to do. There's no limit to the number of feeds you can subscribe to in the app. It uses a popularity metric to surface key items in each folder of subscriptions that you should read if in a time crunch. It's a great little app and well worth a few dollars.

Alexia Tsotsis wrote last night that the company determines the placement of services in the toolbar by popularity, and the Picasa photo sharing service was correctly added, but according to a Google representative it should have been in addition to and not instead of Reader. In celebration of the good news, perhaps we should all send the following video, Common Craft's intro to RSS, to a friend in need of a life changing web technology. It's easy to be snarky about peoples' supposed over-reaction to the demotion of a link, it's another matter to recognize a valuable tool and share it with others.

The Picasa photo service has replaced Reader in navigation bar. Reader is now the first option that appears when a user clicks "more." While this will likely decrease the frequency with which new users discover the magic that is RSS, it's probably also a recognition that the service isn't being used as enthusiastically as anyone had hoped. It may also be related to the fact that Picasa generates revenue for Google and Reader does not.

Firefox recently announced that it too would be moving the RSS feed icon button to the background of its browser by default. Browser extensions are already available to resolve all these problems for users who consider them a problem - the biggest issue is for those who won't even know what they've lost.

As someone who has used RSS daily and in many, many ways, ever since my discovery of the technology changed my life and set me out into this wonderful new career I have - I struggle to articulate its importance, its potential and why it ought to be moved to the foreground, not the background, of the web use experience.

Perhaps this will help: RSS is a simple, flexible, powerful way to bring new content from sites all around the web to one place, as soon as it's available, without going to look for it. It's a magical, automated, completely personalized river of news.

It doesn't depend on someone else Tweeting about it, it's a tool that you can do all kinds of things with. Perhaps most people aren't interested in doing much with the web besides reading articles, playing games, watching videos and posting photos. Surely there are millions and millions of people who feel otherwise, though, and RSS is a great tool for doing more.

For more, see these articles:
How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet About Any Topic
Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader

RSS reader guy picture from FastIcon.

"The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure," Winer wrote in a blog post today. "You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place." This is very good news. It appears that the tool will live first at My.ReallySimple.org (password protected).

Throughout the past decade of massive media disruption, the only people who have played a bigger role in democratizing publishing technology than Winer may be Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams. Winer's work, though, has been technical enough, embedded enough in larger technical communities, so focused on the distributed Web instead of on building up one corporate brand, and so wide-ranging that he's gained far less public recognition than other major players. His near-absolute disinterest in visual design, his chronically caustic personality and his apparently principle-driven burning of bridges haven't helped either. (Disclosure: I used to co-host a podcast with Winer and am forever indebted to him for the technologies he's fostered that have dramatically changed my life and career, but believe that I can make the critical statements above based on far more than how he and I have interacted. Our personal interactions have been just one part of my assessment of the man as a challenging genius.)

None the less, Winer has stepped into the breach of profit-driven companies failing to serve the interests of users time and time again to create platforms that have touched an incalculable number of lives.

Can he do it again? User-facing technologies have never been Winer's strength; he's been much more successful revolutionizing the world of content delivery on the back-end. Can he make distributed publishing, by publishers acting as independent entities instead of sharecroppers for platforms enriching their shareholders, a part of peoples' everyday experiences the same way he helped bring us feed reading and listening to podcasts?

Unless we've all been Farmville-zombified too deeply to care anymore, My.ReallySimple is something we all ought to be cheering for.

There's more to come, too. "This is a piece," Winer writes, "of the loosely-coupled system I envision booting up over the next months and years."