You enter a search term for whatever you want, which you can save as a "trap" that will automatically refresh with new content as it's published around the Web. Every time you log in, you'll see new stuff to read, and the suggestions get more personal every day. The Web app launches today at trap.it, but Trapit was developed as a platform, so this is only the first stage. "We expect to power sites and services across the Web," CEO and co-founder Gary Griffiths says.

When you search on Trapit, the first batch of stories might be pretty good, depending on your query. The interface prompts you to give five stories the thumbs-up or thumbs-down until it's finished personalizing. This isn't an up-vote or down-vote for popularity; it's just whether the article is what you're looking for or not. This is how the AI engine learns what you like and personalizes results for you. After that's done, the results are fine-tuned to your tastes, and the same trap on someone else's profile might look completely different.

Don't think of Trapit as a search tool. You can save traps to your profile, and as the engine finds new stories it thinks will interest you, it delivers them to your traps and gives you a notification. Trapit makes for a great homepage; every time you open your browser, you'll see new stories listed in your activity feed, which you can read now or save to your reading list for later.

While the trendy discovery engines these days are social, trawling your Facebook and Twitter connections and using those to approximate your interests, Trapit goes the other way. It uses only your query, your votes and its machine intelligence. "There's no concept of crowd-sourcing on here," Griffiths says. Trapit shows you featured traps by other users, which you can add as your own, but as soon as you do, they start personalizing for you specifically.

Trapit reminds me of Thoora, an app with a similar mission, but they work rather differently. Thoora's algorithms use certain signals, including popularity but also using smarter semantic data, to pull in content from millions of sources. Trapit scours fewer sources, but it uses different underlying technology with a grasp of natural language.

I've tried out both, and I don't know which is better. They both work much better than dumb popularity-powered aggregators, that's for sure. I can find endless amounts of relevant reading on either one.

Does a personalized news feed like this help you find good stuff to read? Try it out and tell us what you think. Go to trap.it and sign up for free and share your reactions and favorite traps in the comments.

The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.

We covered Thoora's features earlier this week. It's a compelling alternative to the social search phenomenon of letting your friends' tastes substitute for real context. Thoora uses machine learning algorithms to help users build topics using keywords, popularity, and over 100 other quality signals. It's especially good at finding articles from small blogs deep within the Web, a shortcoming of typical search tools. Its attractive interface makes for a great user experience for both work and play applications, and the tablet form factor is a natural fit.

The UI is consistent with the Web version, but menus and controls have been moved to the periphery and organized in a familiar two-column tablet layout.

It's a great fit on a Motorola Xoom, and Carrie Shaw, Thoora's head of product, says that the Honeycomb-based app will be tested on the Kindle Fire as soon as possible. If it works as expected, they'll submit it to the Amazon Appstore. Thoora is also developing for iPad and phones, looking to ship those versions before the end of the year.

Grab the app from the Android Market, try it out and tell us what you think! If you create any cool topics, share them in the comments.

At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.

Digging For Content

Thoora was founded in 2008, and it originally launched as a real-time news aggregator, which we covered back in 2009. But this new iteration is about much more than scanning the news. This is a toolkit for users to explore and research topics, and it learns more about them as its users sort out what matters to them. It is a social tool - users can share topics, and the Thoora site features highlights - but the purpose of the tool is to turn up the most relevant content on the topic, no matter how deeply it's buried in the Web.

"We like to say that we're at the intersection of aggregation, curation and search," says Carrie Shaw, head of product at Thoora. As far as users are concerned, that's a good description, but the real value of Thoora comes from the learning algorithms at work behind the scenes. As users create topics, discover content and clean up the results, the Thoora engine gets better at recommendations.

Shaw says the algorithm scours "28 million sources from the traditional media and the blogosphere... looking at over 100 signals to figure out the relevancy of the results and the order in which to present them." These include social signals, such as shares on Twitter, but it also looks for comments on the article itself, as well as other signs of article quality. If an article is swarming with ads or can be identified as the product of a content farm, that article's importance is diminished.

Creating A Topic

Currently, topics on Thoora stand alone, and topics with the same name by different users are not related. But Shaw says there are some advantages to that, because "different topics develop different angles over time," since topics can have different focuses and keywords. Users can browse existing topics through the Explore gallery, but the best way to see Thoora in action is to create a topic from scratch.

As soon as you choose a title, you can already see the engine at work. A suggested list of keywords appears on the right side, and the keywords adjust as you add more. Before creating the topic, you can either select one keyword as the main descriptor, or you can check "All keywords are equal." Finally, decide whether you want other members to be able to view and follow the topic (on by default), and then click "create topic."

After creating a topic, you can even pull in specific Twitter accounts or RSS feeds to put Thoora's engine to work on links that arrive there. It's a cool way to augment the firehose of content that the algorithm filters through. These can be seen in a tab called "Topic DNA," which shows all the user inputs going into the topic, including its followers, ratings, keywords and more.

The topic page displays a list of text articles with a range of sorting options. The article tab lists the title and a short excerpt along with the source, the date of publication, and the Thoora engine's popularity rating for it. Another tab surfaces related images.

Popularity is hardly the most important factor to the algorithm. In fact, it does a good job of identifying content on minor blogs due to other quality signals, whereas Google News would overlook a site without an established reputation.

If the topic you've created turns up weird or irrelevant results, that's an opportunity, not a problem. There's a trash can button to indicate to Thoora that a result isn't relevant, and if you delete it, the topic updates right away. You can also click the heart button to indicate to Thoora any articles you particularly liked. These new data points improve the algorithm for all users over time.

Sharing The Experience

Though Thoora is useful for personal research, it's also a shareable experience. Users can follow one another and see when new topics are posted. Topics and articles can be easily shared, and Thoora's Explore tab features popular topics, featured topics selected by Thoora editors, and a list of "Au-THOORA-ties" who have lots of followers and create good topics.

The Business of Discovery

Thoora is free, and Shaw says it will implement premium level of service in the coming months. The premium service will target content marketers, and Shaw says it will be "a very low cost." The main additional features will be analytics tools and integration with outside analytics software.

Whether you're a blogger or journalist, an academic, or you're just interested in something, a machine learning-powered tool like Thoora could be a powerful alternative to a purely social service.

If you give Thoora a try, share your cool topics with us in the comments.

Slashdot has struggled to remain relevant across the Web as more mainstream communities like Digg, Hacker News, Reddit and StumbleUpon have taken over geek-news aggregation duties. But Slashdot's community has yet to be replicated on any of these upstart sites. "Slashdot is for nerds too nerdy to be called geeks," says ReadWriteWeb nerd-in-residence Tyler Gillies. It's "full of nerds," adds ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick. "Real nerds."

The Community's Take on Slashdot
A year ago, when we began to notice a marked decline in traffic to ReadWriteWeb from Slashdot, we asked our readers via Twitter if they still check slashdot. Many said they had drastically cut back their visits in favor of other communities:

@peterc: "Still visit /. once a week or so but no longer contribute (used to be a heavy user). Use HN & Reddit mainly now, never Digg."

@jezlyn: "I haven't read /. in many years. Got tired of the snotty attitude and comment wars."

Others remained loyal, but they expressed frustration at Slashdot's slowness to embrace what freelance Web developer @pluc called "the realtime wave."

Still, there seems to be a certain je-ne-sais-quoi about Slashdot's community. "It continues to have a community feel that the other sites you mention do not have," said Adam Monago via Twitter. Monago feels that the new nerd aggregation sites "do not have [an] identifiable set of traits or ideals that bind their users in the same way as Slashdot." For his part, Malda is confident that this community will endure: "My old mantra: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters still holds true here today. Nobody does it better."

Are you a Slashdot reader? How do you feel about CmdrTaco's departure? Let us know in the comments.

Sobees Adds LinkedIn

Similarly, the newly-launched LinkedIn functionality will include features specific to LinkedIn. At launch time, those are as follows:

• Update your status
• View connections
• View profiles
• Get updates (connections updates, status updates, application updates, jobs posted, groups joined, recommendations and profile changes)
• Search or search with advanced functionality

While the desktop version of the program is Windows-only, the web-based application is built using Microsoft's Silverlight technology which works on any operating system, even Linux.

When you go to set up the web version for the first time, you'll be presented with the four supported services and a button reading "connect." At first, clicking the connect button seemed to have no effect but that was because the browser's pop-up blocker was turned on and Sobees launches the authorization screens in a separate window. After navigating past this small obstacle, the rest of the set up process was completed in a matter of minutes.

FactFinder API Integration Lets You Know if a Link is Worth Clicking

Besides simply displaying the most recent updates from the various services, Sobees also offers a unique feature other social networking applications don't have - Factery's FactFinder API integration. (Read more about Factery's API here). In short, this API allows the Sobees client to instantly and automatically parse the URLs posted in Twitter links to help you determine whether or not the link is worth clicking. Using the FactFinder toggle button to the left of the column, your Twitter stream is filtered to show only links with Factery data.

Once switched on, tweets with links are appended with the source URL and various "facts" snipped from the article being shared. Depending on the amount of info the API pulls, a "more..." link may appear at the bottom of the facts displayed. Click this link to see more facts - aka snippets - from the article in question and then click "less" to once again collapse the window. Anyone who has switched to Twitter as their primary source of news will love this sort of feature as you can get the gist of an article without ever leaving Twitter.

If you're interested in trying the updated Sobees clients, you can download the desktop version here or load the web version at sobees.com/web.

Feedly is much more than just another way to read feeds. Although it originally got its start as an alternative UI to Google Reader, today the service is part RSS reader, part social network aggregator and part search utility. Since its launch in 2008, Feedly's developer Edwin Khodabakchian has constantly added new features including Twitter and FriendFeed integrations, a river of news view, search tools, Mozilla Ubiquity integration, a Feedly "mini" toolbar and so much more.

Once installed, a click of a browser button transports you to the Feedly start page where you can browse through the latest news, comment, star, share, discuss and search through the articles displayed. As you read through the items, your activity is seamlessly synced back to Google Reader.

Although voracious RSS readers who subscribe to thousands of feeds may find using Feedly a bit slower than using Google Reader itself, a good many of the more casual consumers of RSS prefer Feedly's clean, easy-to-scan interface to Google Reader's more utilitarian look and feel.

Feedly for Chrome

The new Chrome version of Feedly is virtually identical to the one available for Firefox with only two major exceptions: there is no Gmail integration or Feedly mini toolbar available in the Chrome version just yet. The toolbar is one of Feedly's many innovative features which provides a floating bar that hovers at the bottom of your screen as you surf through blogs on the web. Toolbar buttons show you various pieces of metadata about the blog post you're reading, including number of Diggs and number of Google Reader shares. You can also save or share the post yourself in Google Reader or tweet a link to the article, among other things.

However, according to Khodabakchian, Feedly mini's omission isn't due to any technical issues. Instead, he notes in the comments of a Feedly blog post that the mini toolbar is in the process of being redesigned and when the Firefox version is complete and stable, he will then look into building a toolbar for Chrome. The estimated timeframe for its inclusion into the Chrome beta is 6-8 weeks.

How to Install Feedly for Chrome

In order to run Feedly for Chrome, you'll need to first install a dev build of the Google Chrome browser. These dev ("developer") versions of Chrome aren't as stable as the public release but allow you to play with yet-to-launch features like Google Chrome extensions, for example. And for Mac and Linux users, the dev release is your only option because Google has yet to provide stable versions of Chrome for those two operating systems as of yet.

After installing the dev release, you'll need to add the new Feedly extension to the browser.

Here's how to get started:

1. Download and install the Chrome 4.0 Dev Channel: Windows | Mac | Linux 32-bit | Linux 64-bit
2. Restart Chrome to make sure that you are running the 4.0 version.
3. Load http://update.feedly.com/release/feedly.crx to install Feedly.
4. Click on the Feedly icon on the chrome toolbar to load your Feedly.

After you have Feedly up-and-running, you can receive support through the company's Get Satisfaction page or by emailing feedly-chrome AT devhd.com. You can also tweet @feedly_chrome with questions, comments, and other feedback.

We're beyond excited to see Feedly on Chrome - although it was relatively easy to give up most of our Firefox extensions when we made the move to the Chrome browser, Feedly was one of the few that was sorely missed. However, if you're a more cautious user hesitant to install test builds of your browser and experimental extensions, you may not have to wait much longer before you can play with fully functional and stable versions of both. Yesterday, Google put out the call for developers to begin submitting their extensions for inclusion in the upcoming Chrome extension gallery, a step that signifies that this feature is closer than ever to launching. When the time comes, we're sure that Feedly will be among the top-rated extensions found there.

Recently, FriendDeck developer Paul Kinlan released an Adobe AIR application of his FriendFeed tracking tool. Although still rough around the edges, this app has potential to become a viable alternative interface to FriendFeed for the service's heaviest users.

One of the best features of the new AIR application is how it syncs with the online version of FriendDeck. That means whatever changes you make within FriendDeck on the web show up in the desktop application and vice versa.(Side note: how we wish TweetDeck did this!)

But let's be clear. The Adobe AIR version of FriendDeck still needs a lot of work. The slider bars are hard to see, the columns can't be moved around, "un-like" didn't work in the first version we tested, pictures don't show along with posts, and performing searches requires the use of specific query syntax, like "friends:username." That last bit practically requires you to use a cheat sheet when building your columns. (For search query syntax, see the list provided here.)

Yet despite these problems - all of which are being addressed according to the developer - I still can't get enough of FriendDeck. Why? It's simple: FriendDeck gives me an eagle-eye view of the topics I care about on FriendFeed. Using the app, I can see a lot more information with a glance than when I use the FriendFeed web site itself.

Use FriendDeck to Follow Your Lists, Rooms, and Searches 

There are a couple of ways you can use FriendDeck. For me, a compulsion to organize things into groups has led to the creation of over 30 lists for tracking specific topical areas outside of my "home" feed. I don't check each list daily, but it's nice to have them there. I doubt that anyone else has embarked on such madness, but even if you have only a few lists, like "Favorites" or "Personal", you can add them to the FriendDeck application by typing in "list:list_name" (where, obviously, "list_name" is the name of your list).

Similarly, if you're less inclined to use lists and more inclined to track items by keyword, you can instead just type in the word or words you want to track in the search box. For rooms, you would just type "room:room_name."

Use FriendDeck as a More Advanced Feed Reader

Another great way to use FriendDeck has to do with one of the biggest secrets surrounding FriendFeed itself: you don't have to participate to use the service. Although community members will tell you this goes against what FriendFeed is all about, it's true. If you're the kind of person who could care less about "liking" items or leaving comments on the latest internet meme, you can alternately use FriendFeed as an aggregator on topics you want to track, no participation required. Instead, FriendFeed can simply become the framework you use to build the feed reader of the future: an aggregator which lets you follow much more than RSS feeds alone.

For example, take any subject about which you're passionate. You could build a private FriendFeed room that you fill with blogs, news sites, Twitter searches, Google searches, well-known Twitter users who post on this subject, and more. Within one interface, you can track it all. This is a million times better than just following blogs in an RSS reader or just tracking Twitter posts using Twitter's search engine because you're not limited to RSS alone.

You can share these rooms with others either by making them public or by inviting select users - like your colleagues - to join. Alternately, you can keep them completely private and only for your personal use.

You can then add these personalized rooms into FriendDeck by typing in "room:room_name" and soon you'll have one single application that tracks everything you care about on the internet - from blogs posts to tweets and so much more. And it's all in one window.

Too Complicated?

In explaining how FriendDeck works, it occurs to us that it may sound a bit complicated for the average user. That may be true, but then again, FriendFeed itself is an application that requires a lot of explanation, too. It's also quite possible that FriendFeed and FriendDeck will never cross over into "regular user" territory. That's OK, though. For anyone who has learned how to use FriendFeed - really use FriendFeed - applications like FriendDeck will hold appeal, despite their complications.

It's still far too early to call FriendDeck a complete success or failure, but it's not too early to use it. If you're geeky enough to learn its quirks, you may find the FriendFeed desktop application you've been waiting for. If not, then feel free to return to your browser.

Besides being able to quickly send a link to Twitter, one feature we really like is feedly's integration with Open Calais, Thomson Reuter's semantic web service. Feedly's Calais command overlays semantic metadata on the current page and then links to a page on feedly with related stories from your RSS subscriptions, Delicious, YouTube, and Twitter.

Commands

Feedly's developer Edwin Khodabkchian notes that he will add more commands soon. Here are all the feedly commands that are currently availably in Ubiquity:

With the new SmartSpace service from GoDaddy, anyone can create a personal web site which aggregates your activity from across the social web, combine that with other sources of news and information, and then create a personalized start page containing everything of interest to them. The service can also be used as a blogging platform with social elements like chat already built in. The idea is that you can use the SmartSpace platform to create the kind of site that's right for you, whether that's a social network of sorts, a traditional web site with social elements, a place to host your podcasts, or whatever else you want.

SmartSpace is designed to be easy to use, even for non-technical users. With a click of a button, you can grab content from sites like flickr, YouTube, Google News, Facebook, MySpace, or any other web site that offers an RSS feed.

You can even customize this content to your own personal preferences. For example, if you only want to see Flickr photos of lolcats, you can just type in "lolcat" in the tag field provided. Alternatively, you could select the RSS feed of a particular person's photos.

In addition to this dynamic content form across the social web, GoDaddy also makes available various pre-selected news feeds which you can add if desired. This content is categorized by subject, and is similar to the types of selections that many of today's personalized homepages offer.

Chat & Email

The Chat application lets you have online text conversations right on the site. With the included administrative controls, you can launch a room, invite users, ban users, and participate in both public and private chat sessions. Again, there's nothing technical involved in adding this to your page - the app is already set up and ready to use. All you have to do is make a few choices about how it's displayed and whether it's loaded by default when you log in.

Also, because SocialSpace users have purchased a domain name via GoDaddy, there's an option to set up email addresses using that name. The interface for doing so is much easier to manage than GoDaddy's usual UI for creating email addresses (an ugly and geeky interface). Here, you're basically able to push a button and set up multiple email addresses associated with your domain. The inboxes for these can then be added as widgets to your homepage.

Photo Albums

If you don't keep your images online with a web service like Flickr, you also have the option to make your SmartSpace an online photo album using the SmartSpace photo application. With this, you can upload photos from your computer and then share those photos both publicly and privately in albums that are added to your page.

Web Site and Blogs

For text-based content, you can choose to either add a web site or blog to your homepage. With these options, you can select from a number of pre-built templates to configure the site. Although not as robust a platform as WordPress, the blog will probably work fine for casual users who want to take advantage of the other elements of the SmartSpace service.

Just Another Personalized Homepage Or A New Type Of Social Network?

SocialSpace could be linked to some patent filings the company filed earlier this year which describe a web portal that functions as a social network aggregator. According to those filings, the aggregation could be done using login systems like OpenID. Although there's no mention of OpenID integration in the SmartSpace support documents yet, we hope that integration is something they plan to add in the future.

Still, even without OpenID, what GoDaddy has launched today is a viable competitor to the other personalized homepages out there like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc. But GoDaddy's SocialSpace goes beyond what those sites offer in a number of ways. Although widgetized content like photos and RSS feeds can be added to nearly any start page today, GoDaddy actually lets you own a domain name, set up a blog or website and then easily, instantly turn it into a personalized social network that aggregates content from the social web and includes chat functionality for instant interactions with your friends.

Will SocialSpace kill MySpace and Facebook? That's highly doubtful, but it could be a nice aggregator for those looking to establish a web presence with minimal work. And because it's from GoDaddy, a household name thanks to their high profile TV commercials and ad campaigns, this move also represents what may be the final leap where "social media" fully crosses over to the mainstream use and acceptance.

More Info

Prices for SmartSpace start at $4.99/month for 2 months. From there, the prices are as follows: 12 mo: $4.74/month, 24 mo: $4.49/month, or 36 mo: $4.24/month. You can watch a short introductory video here. ]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php Product Reviews Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:45:00 -0800 Sarah Perez WonderHowTo aggregates and curates a large database of instructional videos from all over the Internet. It employs a number of editors who search the web for good how-to videos and then categorize them into 36 vertical categories. Thanks to this editorial process, the quality of these how-to videos featured on WonderHowTo is surprisingly high and topics range from Spanish pronunciation to surviving nuclear blasts. One of the most interesting features of WonderHowTo is its recently launched 'Related How-To Videos' sidebar for Firefox.

Related How-To Videos in Your Sidebar

The sidebar will display how-to videos on WonderHowTo that relate to whatever you are currently looking at in the main browser window. While you are looking at buying a video console on Amazon, for example, the sidebar will offer you videos on how to set it up or how to configure parental controls. In our tests, the suggested videos generally turned out to be highly relevant, but, as is to be expected, sometimes the videos had very little relation to what were looking at.

One nice feature of the sidebar is that it also displays the ratings that users on the main site have given a video. You can also switch the view in the sidebar from the related videos to the most recent and most popular videos on the site, though unless you just want to entertain yourself by learning a random skill, this is not necessarily that useful.

How-To Videos are Easy to Love for Advertisers

Video how-to sites have steadily grown in popularity, with the likes of ExpertVillage, 5min.com, and Howcast all vying for potential viewers. The growth of this market has also given rise to a number of aggregators, including WonderHowTo itself and its direct competitor, FindHow.

Because users on these sites are clearly already highly engaged with a certain topic, advertisers are very interested in reaching these folks, which makes it relatively easy and profitable to monetize this kind of content. Somebody trying to learn how to find cheap flights on the Internet is, for example, quite likely to react to a JetBlue ad that pops up in the video player on Howcast.

As the competition among how-to video sites growths, all the different players are looking for different ways to differentiate themselves through better video players, widgets, or simply by having better content. For WonderHowTo, the sidebar is a great feature that will surely drive a lot of new users to the site.

Bring Your Own OPML

One of our main issues we had with the earlier incarnation of Regator was that you couldn't import your own OPML files, which seemed to restrict it quite a bit as an RSS reader for more advanced users. While Regator now allows you to upload your own OPML files, your imported feeds will only be visible to you because of Regator's approach of personally vetting all feeds shown on the site. At the same time, Regator will look at every imported feed and consider them for inclusion in the general index, which turns uploading your OPML file into a recommendation mechanism.

New Features

Also new in this release is the ability to share post via Twitter, Facebook, and email. Besides this, Regator spent a lot of time polishing and tweaking the service, as well as adding a few minor features. For the near future, Regator is also expecting to give its users a unique page for shared posts akin to Google's Shared Items pages.

What About Advanced Users?

In our earlier review, we said that Regator was a great resource for mainstream users and maybe even a good introduction to RSS in general. With the ability to upload custom OPML files and the soon to be released Shared Items pages, Regator is now closer to being worth a second look for more advanced users as well. What does hold it back for power users, though, is still the fact that it only displays summaries of articles and doesn't display any images in those summaries. There are good reasons for that, including the fact that the folks at Regator want to give traffic back to those who write the content, but it does make the site just a bit less useful in comparison to a regular RSS reader.

On Moopz, the social media flow is categorized into three main areas: recently active conversations, popular conversations, and quiet conversations. Upon login (you authenticate with your FriendFeed remote key), you'll see the recently active conversations listed on the homepage. On the right side of the homepage in the sidebar, the currently popular conversations are listed at the top and the quiet conversations are listed at the bottom. In the middle of the sidebar is a tag cloud. Each item that comes across FriendFeed is semantically tagged based on its content and those tags are displayed in proportion to the number of stories they represent. (The biggest tag so far? "FriendFeed" of course).

How Moopz Reduces FriendFeed's Noise

However, what's truly innovative and unique about Moopz is the way in consolidates the distributed activity across all of FriendFeed. One of my personal biggest pet peeves about FriendFeed is that the biggest conversations seem to only take place in the top users' streams. Those conversations might take place about an article a lesser-known blogger wrote, but because these FriendFeed super-users have more fans, the conversation will surround their sharing of the article via Google Reader instead of the blog post shared by the small-time blogger.

And if you are the blogger and aren't savvy enough (or just too busy) to track the numerous shares of the article, then you miss out on hearing the conversation taking place. Some people have unfortunately framed this problem as a desire to "own" the conversation, but that couldn't be more wrong. It's a desire to be a part of the conversation no matter where it's happening. There was a time when that conversation happened almost entirely on the blog itself. That's no longer the case.

In any event, by consolidating the stream of noise, Moopz also democratizes FriendFeed conversations. On FriendFeed, popular items are shared by multiple people and conversations then arise around those items. Moopz aggregates those conversations and "likes" into a single combined thread. This also helps eliminate the problem of duplicates on FriendFeed - all the multiple sharings are consolidated be them bookmarks, Google Reader shares, tweets, etc.

A FriendFeed-Flavored Techmeme

This actually makes Moopz the "fair" version of Techmeme. While Techmeme is an amazing service that lets you keep up with the hottest news, its headlines are often from the A-List. On Moopz though, any item from any site can become a popular item - all that matters is that it has the most FriendFeed activity. Also, when you're viewing the page for a popular article, the first few sentences of the article are extracted, which encourages people to actually click through and read the article instead of blindly liking or commenting.

A Story on Moopz

Moopz is definitely a great new way to interact with FriendFeed - it doesn't have to take the place of using FriendFeed itself, but we think several of you will agree: this is FriendFeed done right. 

Disclosure: Mark Carey does ongoing consulting work for ReadWriteWeb. However note that Moopz is an independent product and RWW has no affiliation with it.

While Techmeme has it all covered when it comes finance and technology trends, product reviews are a rare treat. Here's where Tech NewsJunk steps in. The purpose of the aggregation site is to allow you to find out about products before they hit the big leagues. According to Winer's official post about the site's launch,

"A couple of notes. I'm not just interested in new products, I'm also interested in how the products evolve. So if Flickr were to (for example) add a bunch of new features tomorrow, we would defintely link to that.

I also want to hear about products from the people who design and implement them. Their point of view is very important to not only understanding their work, but to understanding the market."

Various Fixes For Your Addiction

As a frequent user of tools like FriendFeed and Twitter, it's no surprise that Winer has implemented numerous ways to keep up with Tech NewsJunk. You can:

• subscribe via RSS
• follow along on FriendFeed
• follow along on Twitter
• read mobile updates (iPhone or Blackberry
• refresh the site's page manually

Winer also has future plans to include the latest micro-blogging service darling identi.ca and roll out email updates.

Best Product Coverage

Thus far, Tech NewsJunk has decent product coverage from a host of great sites. The featured content ranges from internet apps to mobile technology. Winer also notes that ReadWriteWeb is one of the best sites to find product coverage and even extends some advice to us (we're listening Dave). As of this post, ReadWriteWeb is listed three times in the counts section, with two of our articles coming in at #2 and #3 respectively. All in all, Tech NewsJunk is a must have in anyone's feed reader.

A couple of things set Regator apart from other RSS aggregators like Bloglines, Newsgator, or Google Reader. First of all, Regator only offers a set of roughly 3000 blogs to subscribe to, as well as 'channels,' like Technology, Politics, Sports, etc.

You can't import your own OPML files or subscribe to blogs from outside of Regator. While this is clearly meant to keep things simple for Regator's user base, it does limit its usefulness for more advanced users. You can, however, nominate your favorite blogs to be added to Regator's catalog.

Another difference between Regator and other RSS aggregators is that while Regator opens in a River of News style view, the default view is organized by popularity, not chronology. Users can vote up or down on every post and those votes determine the position of the posts on the site. Regator does have the option to switch to a chronological view.

While Regator does not feature any social networking or sharing functions yet, users can comment on blog posts, though those comments stay within the Regator silo.

Only Summaries

One thing that might make bloggers happy, but makes Regator just a little bit less useful is the fact that it only displays summaries and not the full text of all blog posts. It also doesn't display any pictures from those blog posts, even if they are part of the summary. Regator says they are doing this to give back to the bloggers featured on the site. Given the many discussions around full feeds and community sites lately, they are definitely doing the right thing, especially because Regator has comments on its site.

Audio and Video

Besides blog posts, Regator also functions as a podcast and video player. Posts with embedded media like mp3 files or YouTube videos will display those in either a pop-up player for videos or a little audio player at the bottom of the screen (see screenshot). Especially the audio player is a nifty solution, as you can keep browsing the site while the player stays out of the way at the bottom of the page.

Verdict

Overall, Regator seems like a very well thought out product. Finding blogs and channels to read is easy and the "What's Hot" bar on the right side gives you a quick overview of what the most hotly debated topics in the blogosphere are right now. The green theme, which can't be changed, might not be everybody's cup of tea, but the layout of the site works very well.

Invites

Regator has given us 100 invites - you can claim yours by heading to Regator's homepage and using 'readwriteweb' as your invite code.

Smashing Feeds happens to be just like any other news aggregator. It uses the Google AJAX feed API for feed creation and management to aggregate news from a ton of various sources. It doesn't require users to signup, but it's not customizable and the UI isn't something we're goo-goo gah-gah over. The aggregated news coverage sites are separated into categories such as Technology, Business, Productivity, Web 2.0, and more. None of these sections are new, but their "Tweet" section is a definite eye catcher.

Twitter and FriendFeed News

The 'Tweet' section of Smashing Feeds has a host of Twitter and FriendFeed related news. This section sports links aggregated from FriendFeed with usernames included in the headlines, links to what seems to be random tweets from Twitter, the latest links to make it on TwitLinks, Intwition, Tweetmeme River, TwitBuzz, Twemes, and the Techmeme Firehose Twitter stream. Basically, you can get the hottest and most popular Twitter links from various services all on one page.

Not Much To Offer

Bouncing from site to site that aggregates the hottest or most popular links on Twitter can be a chore. Users usually end up just picking on site and sticking with it. The 'Tweet' section of Smashing Feeds solves this problem. However, the randomness of some of the aggregated sites are weird. Why are random twitter messages and FriendFeed messages being aggregated as news? I'd suggest they stick to the sites that do most of the aggregation for them and aggregate those sites for the 'Tweet' section. Beyond that, Smashing Feed isn't offering anything better than the competition.