Most recently, Feedly has been working on enhancing the functionality of Feedly Mini (which we cover here) to go beyond being a convenient place to share the page you are currently reading. Previously, the occasional mysterious topic result would appear if you were on a page relating to, say, politics or movies. Now, that feature has been expanded and refined to work on any search query on certain sites, like Google or Amazon. Feedly quickly brings up a weighted result list of discussions and links, along with a link to the originating sites. The search that is performed is done on the client, and no search data is being sent back to Feedly, Google Reader or any other service. The new feature, just like Feedly mini itself, can be turned off in Feedly options as well.

Overall, the new search feature is nicely implemented and we think it will come in very useful. We do have one small wish though, to cover those corner cases where you might be searching for something, say an article on Wikipedia or a product on eBay that you want to share with your friends on Twitter or Friendfeed.. in those cases, we want both the functions of Feedly Mini on the same page - search and share buttons. But for the moment we can't figure out how to turn that on. It either does one or the other, depending on what site you are on.

Newspapers have always looked for alternative distribution mechanisms, and Popular Mechanics reports that as early as in 1939 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tested the idea of electronically sending newspapers to customers' homes. Martin Langeveld discusses the history - and failure - of personalized and faxed newspapers on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog in some more detail.

Giving Readers a Choice

MediaNews' Peter R. Vandevanter, however, seems completely unmoved by the earlier failures of this idea. In an interview with the New York Times, he argues that "individuated news" - MediaNews' trademarked term for this idea - will give readers the ability to "decide what they want to read and on what platform." Of course, readers already have this choice, and, in large numbers, they have made the choice that print is not the medium they are interested in. We also can't imagine that too many readers would want to have yet another printer at home that is dedicated to nothing else but printing the morning paper.

As Andrew Smith of the Dallas Morning News argues, all newspapers have to do is simply provide readers with customized feeds for their online readers. Then, if you really want to print your individualized newspaper, you could just use a free tool like FeedJournal  - and you don't even have to put yet another proprietary device into your house. Of course, if you already use Google Reader and you want a magazine-style feed reader that you can use to read on your screen, Feedly is the way to go.

CC-licensed image of dead trees used courtesy of Flickr users piglicker.

In this latest version, the metadata you're able to see includes the number of FriendFeed conversations, the number of Diggs, and the number of times the post has been shared in Google Reader or Feedly. To the right of those informational icons are more buttons that let you share the post in Google Reader/Feedly, save the page for later reading (star in Google Reader), Twitter the page, or email it to a friend.

When you've finished reading (and interacting) with the content on your screen, there's a "next" button which you can click to go to the next recommendation in your Feedly/Google Reader.

Integrated Twitter and FriendFeed

In addition to providing tools that help you better understand and share the blog posts you read, Feedly also reminds you how you came across them in the first place. If you originally saw the post on Twitter, a small notification will pop-up to remind you of that tweet and on the notification window there's an option to reply or re-tweet the information directly from the web page you're currently on.

Alternately, if the article you're reading is hot on FriendFeed, Feedly Mini's pop-up will notify you of a popular conversation around the blog's content occurring on FriendFeed. With one click, you can then join that conversation.

If you're not a fan of notifications or just want to dial them back a bit, you can do so from a preference knob called "Mini Friendfeed Notifications" which allows you to control and customize the behavior of these notifications.

How To Get It

All these new features will be made available today as part of a Feedly update to v 1.2 patch 170. If you're not seeing these features yet, don't worry - Feedly is good about delivering automatic updates to their users. In other words, you can install Feedly now, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen. If you do end up trying the new version, you can let @feedly on Twitter know what you think. If you run into any problems, you can log it on get satisfaction where every ticket is responded to within 24 hours.

You never know what Feedly will add next. Past updates includes integration with Ubiquity, integration with your Google Search, and more. Based on the image below, it appears that Twitter and FriendFeed are only the start of Feedly's planned integrations for this increasingly useful tool.

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:

Ambient News is a new Firefox add-on written by Mozilla developer Atul Varma and is currently available as an alpha release. The add-on tracks your browsing habits, learning which sites you visit most frequently. It then pulls the headlines in from those sites and displays them for you in a beautifully fading list every time you open a new tab in Firefox. If you see something that interests you, just click the link and you'll be taken to the web site where the headline originated. Privacy advocates, rest assured - no data is shared outside your browser.

Intelligent Agents to the Rescue!

As Michael Calore of Wired notes, the add-on is a great workaround for the biggest usability problem facing RSS. "Many people don't know what it is or how to take advantage of it," he writes. "The first hint that a feed exists is a funky orange or blue icon. Click on it and, in most cases, you get prompted to load another application. Sometimes, you just see ugly, raw XML output."

But since we're mostly web geeks here at ReadWriteWeb, we're more enthralled with another aspect to this tool: its intelligence. As we mentioned not too long ago, cloud agents are on the rise. The term, coined by blogger Chris Arkenberg, refers to automated agents that help us better deal with the volumes of data we have to sort through every day. Although Ambient News isn't necessary a full-on cloud agent - it doesn't actually work in the cloud - it can still certainly be considered an agent, especially since it helps us sort through a barrage of information in a new way.

Other Alternatives

Ambient News is not the only alternative to the traditional RSS Reader. Over the past year at ReadWriteWeb, we've also made mention of other alternative news readers like Feedly, which puts a magazine-style interface on top of Google Reader. Another popular RSS reader is Snackr, an Adobe AIR app that scrolls headlines across your screen like a news ticker. Then there is, of course, FriendFeed, a lifestreaming application that's quickly becoming an alternative way to share information among the early adopter set.

Alternative RSS readers aren't for everyone, though - journalists, bloggers, researchers, and the like may still need to use a jam-packed feed reader in order to seek out the elusive info they seek on a regular basis. But for those of you who are more casual web surfers and blog readers, alternative RSS readers are a less stressful way to get your news without the news getting to you.

Feedly's River of News

This new river view offers the following features:

• Longer lists of 200+ articles, loaded on demand as you scroll.
• Ability to set various type of filters: unread, category, subscription.
• Keyboard shortcuts - the same as Google Reader
• Ability to click on the summary of an article and expand it inline.
• Ability to play video and listen to podcasts directly from the list.
• Google Reader-like ability to automatically mark articles as read while scrolling
• Summize-like notifications when new articles are published.

Now even sophisticated RSS users can have the best of both worlds - quick access to all of Feedly's features while also being able to scan the news almost as fast as in Google Reader itself.

If you're a Firefox and Google Reader user and you haven't yet installed the Feedly plugin, you're going to want to install it today after you hear this: Feedly has now integrated its own results - that is, links to the relevant posts from your Google Reader - right into your Google search results. This integration essentially adds a layer of social search directly into Google, and all with no extra work on your part besides simply having installed the plugin.

To get you up to speed, Feedly is a service and a Firefox plugin that provides an alternative way to read your feeds. Its magazine-style interface presents the news to you in a more visually appealing way while still keeping it categorized by your own tagging system. As your read news items in Feedly, they're marked as read in Google Reader; as you "Recommend" items in Feedly, they're "Shared" in Google Reader; as you "Annotate," they're shared with a note, etc.

However, for voracious RSS readers like myself, Feedly is a much slower way to read the news, which is perhaps why it hasn't really taken off to a great extent among the early adopter set. That's a shame, though, because Feedly can do so much more than many people may realize.

For one, it's integrated with both Twitter and FriendFeed letting you tweet or share an item on either of those services (even FriendFeed rooms)with just one click. It also pulls in the blog comments, comments from Digg, and the FriendFeed conversations surrounding an article and lets you add your own thoughts to FriendFeed stream - without you having to view the page on FriendFeed itself.

Although it does show full feeds (just like Google Reader), it also allows blog owners to showcase their sponsors via a designated ad spot. On an area called "The Wall," you have the option to configure the page to show a mix of recommended items from Google Reader plus other sources. Those other sources can include your Firefox Bookmarks, your MyYahoo items, items from NetVibes, and items from Bloglines, as well as social connections like your Twitter stream, your FriendFeed stream, items from Yahoo Mail or Gmail. You can also select "best of" content to be mixed in from any number of categories from fashion to celebrities to tech or you can even upload your own OPML file.

Feedly Secrets

There are still a few secrets to discover about Feedly though. Despite all that it does, you may be surprised to know what more it's capable of. One of the biggest undiscovered gems is that as you "follow" friends on Feedly, you are immediately tapped into their Google Reader Shared Items - even if you're not "Google Friends." Their shared items will show up in Google Reader in a folder called "z.feedly.people." This is great for those who don't use Gmail or GTalk but still want access to people's Google Reader Shares. Friending people right now is somewhat of a difficult process because you have to find users on your own - there's no search feature for finding people. However, this friends feature is said to be getting an overhaul soon and we're looking forward to checking out.

Spring cleaning is a feature available from the "more" option that helps you eliminate the feeds you don't read. The interface color codes feeds to let you know how much you like them. The colors are as follows:

• Red: A candidate for deletion because you are not reading articles from the feed and/or the feed does not seem to produce articles.

• Orange: Produces a lot more than you are reading

• Green: You seem to like those feeds a lot.

• White: Everything else

Feedly + Google Search Integration

But today's big news is the Feedly+Google Search integration. As you search for a subject in Google, Feedly search results will appear at the top of the page. At present, the search results will only appear if you have related RSS items 7 days old or less (which explains why I had not yet seen this before).

This integration adds an immediate social filtering aspect to searching the web by promoting your favorite sources to the top of your search results. It even takes into account your reading patterns and the favorite metadata to sort the results.

With this feature, it doesn't even matter if you want to use Feedly to read feeds - this behind-the-scenes social filtering makes it a killer add-on for anyone who uses Firefox and Google Reader. You can download Feedly from here.

"There is no question in my mind that convergence is now coming to digital entertainment and consumer electronics. Consumer electronics products are being built using common hardware components from the computer industry, for example, microprocessors, memory, storage, and so on, and most of their capabilities are now being designed as software. The drive toward open standards to link all the components in the home parallels what has been going on in IT for the last 10 to 15 years, and without a doubt, broadband Internet is emerging as the major communications and content distribution platform into the home."

While most R/WW readers already know all this, the article is a nice summation of where we're at circa 2006 with digital media.

"I’m actually coming to the conclusion that the whole subscriptions mindset is a problem and that in future we’ll ‘graze’ for the most part instead of subscribing. As Zigbee sensors, RFID chips and GPS trackers proliferate we’ll be drowing in an RSS-everywhere world if we don’t change our approach.

We don‚Äôt subscribe to all the sensory feed in physical world, we sample, nibble, taste, glance. Taskable and OPod (and whatever Kosso‚Äôs working on) are first generation ‚ÄúFeed Grazers‚Ä? IMHO. They allow you to graze feeds without ever subscribing. All we need is for static OPML directories to proliferate and for OPML search engines (like Gada.be) to improve at building multi-level hierarchies on the fly."

Intrigued, I checked out the apps that James referenced. Taskable is described as "a new kind of RSS and OPML browser built into the Windows taskbar notification area." OPod is "an AJAX OPML and RSS viewer widget that you can embed in any web page you like." Uh, right. I'm none the wiser.

In another post, James calls them "on-demand feeds" - which is more grokable. So you only need these feeds for a short time, then you dispose of them... My Auckland friend Charles Coxhead has been exploring the notion of disposable feeds too.

It's an interesting concept and one which I obviously need to think more on - and read more of James' posts (and Charles too, when he gets around to posting about his experiments). 2006 seems to have become the year when we've realised that RSS, for all the benefits it brings of being able to subscribe to information, doesn't actually solve the core problem of information overload. Perhaps feed grazing, or on-demand feeds, is a step closer to solving the overload problem...