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News and activity feeds are more alive today than ever before, even as engagement with their simplest format, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), appears to be waning. What were the Top 10 Most Awesome RSS & Feed Products of 2011? We offer our list below. Though some of these weren't born in the past year, all of them have made a big impact and are thoroughly awesome.

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.

We have written quite a lot about the decline of the startpage and the dismal state of RSS readers. No matter the state of these two markets, Genieo manages to combine these two with a sophisticated recommendation engine to bring you a personalized startpage based on the sites you visit throughout the day. As you surf the web, Genieo constantly learns about the topics you are interested in and automatically subscribes to the feeds of those sites you visit regularly. Thanks to its sophisticated recommendation engine, the service can then determine which stories to show you on its startpage.

Twitter has just launched its first official iPad application, and the reviews so far have been glowing. The new app offers a few notable features, such as panes for interacting with content within a stream, media which displays inline without slowing you down and gesture support for common Twitter actions.

What stands out the most about this new application is not a summary of its features, however. It's how the app fits into this growing trend that positions the iPad as the go-to device for consuming streams. With its touchscreen interface, the Apple tablet is ideal for both viewing and interacting with flows of information - not just tweets, but also Facebook status updates, news, RSS feeds, photos and more.

Fever, a gorgeous RSS reader we dubbed one of the top syndication technologies of 2009, is now available in iPad format by way of a new mobile application called "Ashes." Like its desktop sibling, the Ashes RSS reader offers the same ranking features that make Fever so much fun to use.

Instead of overloading you with information as you increase your RSS subscriptions, Fever actually works better the more feeds you add. It automatically picks out the most-discussed feeds from a given period of time and surfaces those to the top of the reader, assigning temperatures next to the headlines (hence the name "Fever" - Get it? These feeds are hot!) The more feeds it has to work with, the better these rankings become. Meanwhile, unread counts are hidden so you can focus on the signal while ignoring the noise...and do so completely guilt-free.

Since the device's release 2 months ago, many have praised the iPad for its media consumption capabilities while admitting that media creation is not its strong suit. It may not be the best device to compose a day's worth of emails, but watching video and reading books and news on the large touchscreen is certainly a compelling experience. Feeds are one of the most efficient ways to quickly consume large amounts of information from the Web, and feed reading service Netvibes is bringing their popular Web-based experience to the consumption-friendly iPad.

Mozilla Labs has launched a new "lifestream" platform called sudoSocial. Pulling its name from the Linux command "sudo" which allows users to run programs with other, usually elevated privileges, the sudoSocial publishing platform aims to give you both access and control over your many online identities.

Although sudoSocial would be suitable for curating any stream of content, explains the introductory blog post, in its early, still rather sparse format, it's better for personal homepages that aggregate your various feeds, like Flickr photos and blog posts, for example.

Fliptop, a new content subscription service, is one of several companies presenting at this week's DEMO conference in Palm Springs. Among a large group of startups, this was one of the first to catch my eye, making me think "wow, I need that!" In short, what Fliptop offers is a simple way to subscribe to a website's content. But unlike traditional RSS feeds, which just offer a direct feed which must be added to an RSS reader like Google Reader or FeedDemon, Fliptop's service provides more features, like the option to filter content by keyword, follow only select topics or categories and the ability to receive email digests of the just content you're interested in.

Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google's Fast Flip. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader's ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences.

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.