ReadWriteWeb

5 years ago I wrote a prediction about RSS here on ReadWriteWeb. I proclaimed that "in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people."

I think it's fair to say that I was totally wrong on that prediction. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, in particular, many more people 'subscribe' to people than topics (subscribe a.k.a. 'follow' or 'friend'). And I'm glad my prediction didn't pan out, because the social graph of people is much more interesting to follow than a bunch of keywords. But it begs the question: what happened to all the promise of tracking topics using RSS?

In late November, ReadWriteWeb asked the question, Can Netvibes pull off integration of real-time feeds into its existing dashboard product?. At the time, early testers were just gaining access to Wasabi beta. As of today the service will go live to the public concurrent with CEO Freddy Mini's presentation at the Le Web conference.

If your job requires you to have your finger on the pulse of an industry, then you should take note. Curated feed community Collected offers users a great option for aggregating the latest info from their favorite sites. First developed by Stockholm-based new media agency Great Works, Collected aggregates feeds from blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Friendfeed and allows you to create fast web-based collections.

The New York Times just released an interesting new tool that allows users to filter articles from the newspaper's website by tags and keywords and turn them into custom feeds. While developers could already build similar tools on top of the paper's Article Search API and TimesTags API, the new Custom Times Feeds give everybody the ability to create persistent searches based on their personal preferences.

In an email today, Lazyfeed cofounder and CEO Ethan Gahng informed us that the RSS reader is now supporting both RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub protocols, allowing for real-time integration of Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, and Feedburner content.

"Our internal tests show that the service has actually become significantly faster," Gahng wrote. "Now some content from as recent as several seconds ago is being notified through Lazyfeed."

Another day, another way to find, sort, and digest the firehose of online content. Right?

This time, we bring you something very exciting. Guzzle.it is one of the cleanest, coolest, most intuitive, most customizable news dashboards we've seen. It's lightning fast to set up and makes finding and reading news and blog posts that are hyper-relevant very easy, indeed. It reminds us of a more personalized Alltop or one of the nifty, custom-built dashboards a tech journalist might have. Best of all, it allows for multiple fields of interest and creative layouts. Guzzle.it just might change how you read the Internet.

Twubs - it's not the mean-spirited nickname the kids called us in high school, nor is it the Miami Vice detective opposite Don Johnson. Similar to Hashtags.org, Twubs is a Twitter aggregator that allows users to contribute on breaking news, popular trends, shared conferences and memes such as #followfriday and #musicmonday. In addition to indexing basic tweets, the service also displays photos and videos that share a common hashtag. Earlier today Twubs launched a free conference suite in the hopes that conference planners will take a cue from Gnomedex founder Chris Pirillo and incorporate back channels and live feeds into their events.

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.

We can no longer call Feedly just "an alternative interface for Google Reader" as we once did. Since the launch of Feedly Mini, a new mini bar that hovers at the bottom of the screen as you surf through blogs on the web, the service has become more of blog reading companion than anything else. Today that bar, also known as Feedly Mini, has been updated to better integrate both Twitter and FriendFeed with your blog reading. The experience is incredible and makes Feedly a must-have tool for anyone who uses these services.