ReadWriteWeb

We just received confirmation from Google that Google Reader now consumes PubSubHubbub feeds in real time. Until now, it often took half an hour or longer before new posts from popular blogs and news sites would appear in Google Reader. Now, however, posts from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds (including our own RSS feed) have started to appear in Google Reader almost immediately after they are published.

Google just announced an interesting update to Google Reader. Google's online feed reader now allows you to track changes on any page - even those that don't feature an RSS feed. Google will create its own custom feeds for these sites and update the feed whenever it notices a change. Google Reader will display a short snippet of the page changes in the RSS feed.

Google Reader offers a nifty mobile interface, and apps like Byline (iTunes link) and NetNewsWire (iTunes link) are well-designed native apps that allow iPhone users to keep up with their feeds. But slogging through a few hundred subscriptions on the iPhone's small screen can quickly turn into a frustrating experience. My6Sense, which launched the first beta of its web-based mobile feed reader last December, is now finally ready to release its native iPhone app. Thanks to the app's ability to organize your feeds according to a personalized recommendation system that automatically learns from your preferences as you browse through your feeds, keeping up with hundreds of feeds on the iPhone is now easier than ever before.

Feedinvader is an interesting Firefox plugin that combines an online feed reader with a news ticker right underneath your bookmarks bar. The feed reader in the back-end is currently mostly for managing the feeds in the ticker, but with a bit of additional work, it could also become a great reader in its own right.

The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story's excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.

If you like to follow the hottest news at Digg.com and use the Digg RSS feed to do so, you've probably been a little overwhelmed by the number of stories it pumps out. Now there's a simple web app that lets you customize the Digg RSS feed by the minimum number of diggs a story has received. You can then view the stories on the disstill web site or you can subscribe to your new, filtered feed. Sometimes it's little things like this that really make our day.

The Google Reader team just announced the addition of an important new feature to Google's popular feed reader: you can now comment on any item that your friends have shared with you. In order to keep track of these conversations, Google has now also introduced a 'comments view' that will only show an excerpt of the post, but which highlights the comments your friends have made.