Interesting, But Intentionally Limited

Sadly, though, the tool is also still somewhat limited. It doesn't for example, support Boolean operators (AND, OR, etc.) in queries. Adding additional search terms simply restricts searches to articles where both terms appear. There is no option to turn this around and make the query an 'or' search. All of this wouldn't be a problem if the app allowed users to then combine different feeds, but this isn't an option - though you could obviously use Yahoo Pipes or a similar product to combine these feeds yourself.

According to the Times, these limitations are intentional and meant to "keep the application simple and approachable."

If you are only interested in receiving updates about a very limited set of topics, then setting up a tab in Netvibes or iGoogle for a number of custom feeds is definitely an interesting proposition. On the other hand, you could also get similar and more customizable alerts from a wider range of publications through Google Alerts (though Google won't help you to find appropriate keywords) or a real-time service like Lazyfeed.

The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

There's really not much to the disstill web application, but that's okay with us. This is definitely an example of how the simplest web apps can be the most useful in the end.

The only thing on the disstill web page is a little slider bar that lets you filter Digg.com stories based on a minimum number of diggs. You just drag the slider to adjust the number of diggs that stories need to have in order to be included in the RSS feed. The low end of the slider is set to 100 diggs and the high end is 5000. Obviously, the higher you go, the more filtered the feed becomes and the more likely you're only going to see the really, really hot stories.

Once you have the slider set, you can either view the page or click "get the RSS feed" to add the customized feed to your preferred feed reader. It's a lot easier than using Yahoo Pipes, that's for sure!

A Couple of Suggestions

Our only complaint about this nifty little web app is that it doesn't let you choose which section the stories come from (Politics, Technology, Science, Gaming, etc.). Instead, it looks at the entire Digg website. We would also love to filter for images and videos, too. Perhaps in some future version, we hope?

At any rate, this is one of those little tools that can end up making your life a little less info-overloaded. And for that, we thank you, Mr. Alex Rabarts. (P.S. Can you build a generic version of this that lets you enter in any URL and then filter by PostRank? That would be amazing!)

Alex also created a nice visualization of Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hacker News, and Yahoo Buzz that's worth a look. Check it out at oursignal.com.

The comment feature is also available in the mobile version of Google Reader.

As of now, the comments you make in Google Reader remain in Google's silo and won't be syndicated back to the original blog. It is not clear if Google will give developers access to these comments so that they can create plugins that aggregate these Google Reader comments and display them on the original post or on an aggregation service like FriendFeed. In the announcement, however, the Google Reader team stresses that it wants to give its users the ability to have private conversations.

Google has been relatively slow to add social features to Google Reader and most of the discussions around shared items now happen on other services like FriendFeed and Facebook. It will be interesting to see if users will actually use this new feature in large numbers, but it is definitely an interesting addition to Google Reader. In the announcement, Google specifically mentions that it has "much more planned for this feature," and we can't help but wonder if Google is planning to allow users to comment on any item in Google Reader (similar to the SearchWiki functionality in its search engine).

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.

Feed Management: The Internet Monopoly

Surprisingly, feed management is one service where there aren't a million different options available. Unlike Web 2.0 sites like Twitter and Friendfeed, whose competitors are plentiful and varied, FeedBurner stands alone. Years ago there was Feedpass, but it never got off the ground. These days, as Allen Stern just noted on CenterNetworks, the only other viable option is Pheedo, a service that offers basically the same services as FeedBurner, but also seems to come with the same set of issues: feeds don't update too quickly, much less in real-time.

Obviously, this lack of true competition is a giant, gaping hole that everyone is waiting for someone to fill. That's why we have our eyes pinned on Feedsqueezer service, hoping that something will come of it.

Feedsqueezer, the Upcoming Alternative to FB

Today, the Feedsqueezer homepage is nothing more than a promise of what's to come: a feed management platform that delivers analytics, SEO, feed re-distribution, content delivery, and more. There's a quiet Twitter account and an unused GetSatisfaction page set up for the service. The one employee representing the service there is "gadgetboy," aka John Federico, a marketing and business development representative whose prior experience includes serving as VP of Marketing for BlogTalkRadio, Senior Strategist for IconNicholson, Sr. Director of podcasting for Audible, Inc., and more.

The only clue we have to Feedsqueezer's progress is yesterday's one (and only) tweet that announces "getting schooled in all things EC2," a reference to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service where it appears Feedsqueezer will be hosted.

At least a day old tweet appears to be progress. Now, more than ever, publishers need a real alternative to Feedburner. Anyone interested in signing up for the beta can do so from the Feedsqueezer homepage. Who knows? It's worth a shot.

Update: We mistakenly reported that FeedSquuezer was Winer's own project in our initial coverage. Winer is in fact not associated with the service in any way and we apologize for the error in reporting. The confusion resulted from his statement on his blog: "I also volunteer to help get a Feedburner competitor on the air...update:Feedsqueezer."

Auto-Detect RSS in Chrome

On the web page http://www.feeds.ramisp.org, there are two bookmarklets available: "View RSS Feed" and Auto-Detect RSS." Drag each of these bookmarklets to Chrome's bookmark bar. Then, whenever you're on a page that has an RSS feed, you just have to hit the "Auto-Detect RSS" button. This will take you to a page where the feed is displayed along with several auto-subscription links up at the top. Alternately, you can just hit "view RSS feed," if you want to see the RSS feed in the browser, but this option didn't always work in our tests.

One of the problems with the ramisp.org bookmarklets, though, is the limited choice of RSS readers they offer underneath the "Subscribe Now!" section. Currently, you have the option to subscribe using Google, Pageflakes, My Yahoo!, and Netvibes. Although that covers many of the popular readers, there are still several that were left out.

Luckily, a commenter on LifeHacker has modified the scripts to include a few more. If you use Newsgator, Podnova, or Odeo, you should grab his bookmarklet instead from http://savanttools.com/feedhelp-bookmarklet.asp.

For Google Reader Users, Google Bookmarklets are Best

However, for Google Reader fans, the best bookmarklets for subscribing to feeds still come from Google themselves. Unlike the above options, Google addresses the issue of sites offering more than one feed. Google provides two bookmarklets to choose from for simple RSS subscribing:

Google also offers ways to note and share items using bookmarklets, too.

As handy as all these options are, at best they are still a workaround for what should be a built-in feature. Why wouldn't Google at the very least include an RSS button in Chrome that integrates directly with their own RSS Reader? We don't understand the delay on this design decision - we just hope they are working on correcting this oversight.

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.

But I've been burned too often by mystery-meat teasers that fall far short of their promise, or that are ambiguously worded and turn out to be about something completely different. So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible -- and that's a bar that's high and rising.

More Noise to Signal

But when it comes to newspaper feeds, that ease of reading "everything in one place" has often been plagued by a great deal of clicking, given that traditional publications have opted to remand their posts to partial summaries rather than full-text. Now, The Guardian takes a step to change that by offering full-text through their RSS feed.

According to ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick "The UK Guardian is the best example of a newspaper that understands the opportunities in becoming a broker of machine-readable data, instead of just human readable content." With this move, however, they show that they still clearly understand the human element, as well. Truly, they're taking the lead as a publication that offers the best of both worlds.

For The Guardian, this marks another progressive step forward in demonstrating how traditional media publications embrace the world of online media. But it's not the last. With the influence of the recently acquired paidContent team and continued vision of employees like Matt McAllister - formerly of Yahoo! - we're looking forward to The Guardian's continued thought leadership in this regard.

Besides being able to pick who to share with, you will now also receive a notification when others decides to share posts with you. Google Reader will then prompt you with an option to also share your own items with them. In this new implementation, you also get the option to just continue doing business as usual and to keep sharing all your items with all you Gmail Chat contacts.

It's important to point out, though, that your Shared Items are still always made public on your Shared Items page, without the option to turn this off. This new feature only lets you control who will see you shared items in Google Reader directly.

Given the original firestorm over this feature, a lot of people will greet this update as being too long in the making, but judging from our first impression, Google did a very good job in implementing these granular controls and it will be interesting to see if it will use this 'friending' feature in other products as well. As more and more companies are being built around sharing posts within a social network, Google itself has not really taken advantage of this, yet.

When you're reading any item from a particular feed, you'll notice thumbs up/thumbs down buttons at the top for voting and a button that keeps track of how many votes a particular post has received. There's also an option to email the article to a friend or bookmark it for yourself.

Viewing a Post on FeedzZ

However, what's really interesting are the tags at the bottom of the post. These tags aren't generated by people, but by the underlying semantic technologies. For example, our recent post "Watch Out Silicon Valley: Here Comes NYC" was tagged: new york michael bloomberg internet week web-oriented technologies seed-stage technology fund. There's also a "related entries" link which displays a list of posts with at least one of the same tags. In this example, thanks to the tag "New York," there were several unrelated entries listed here, but there was also a link to an article about the NYC Seed Fund. So in this case, the more accurate results came from just viewing the "internet week" tag.

In addition to the tags on each post, every page of FeedzZ has an automatically generated, semantically created tag cloud on the left which you can use to see all the posts about a particular subject (Example: Bill Gates).

Issues With FeedzZ

Of course, these related entries and tags could become infinitely more useful if you were to upload your own OPML file. Unfortunately, for true feed junkies that's probably something that will have to wait, since FeedzZ currently imposes a limit on OPML file sizes, restricting them 100 KB or less. (At 142 KB for my subscription list, I was out of luck).

FeedzZ is certainly an interesting experiment in semantics, but that being said, the site still needs a lot more finesse to really be successful. The OPML restriction is only one of the issues. Even if you manage to get your OPML uploaded, it's difficult to determine how to proceed with the data you've imported. You have to find your way into your profile section (no link is provided) and then you have to create a folder structure and classify your feeds. Shouldn't a semantic system know where the feeds belong? When I tried this, I couldn't even classify my feeds manually. Although I clicked the "Classify" button, there was never a feed in the drop-down list to select (see below), so I couldn't proceed. It's as if that piece of the web site was not even built yet.

Attempting to Classify a Feed

These types of issues are major problems in terms of usability, so it's hard to truly recommend the site at this time. However, if these problems were resolved, FeedzZ could then have a shot at being a useful online feed aggregator or even a great research tool for finding related news items on the topics that interest you. It's great that FeedzZ has managed to get the semantic RSS technologies working, but now they need to turn their attention to the user experience and UI design so we all can appreciate their efforts.

Of course, we have to begin by sharing our own feeds with you. The ReadWriteWeb network has several different feeds you can subscribe to, including:

• ReadWriteWeb
• ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-Up
• ReadWriteTalk (RSS)
• ReadWriteTalk (Add to iTunes)
• Last100
• AltSearchEngines

Some of the RWW Network writers also maintain their own personal sites you can subscribe to:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick (Personal)
• Josh Catone (Tumblog)
• Sarah Perez (Personal)
• Corvida (Personal)
• Sean Ammirati (Personal)
• Alex Iskold (Personal)
• Steve O'Hear (ZDNet)

Or just grab a "Best Of" OPML file for all of these: (Download Here)

RSS/OPML Files We've Shared

Our primary OPML resources come from this January post called "What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008," where we put together OPML files for the biggest trends in 2008: Open Data, Recommendation, Semantic Web, Mobile, and Visualization. From the post "WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog Web," we provided readers with many ways to keep track of leaks and news, one of which was a Governement Watchdogs Site OPML file. When we wrote about "How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet," we provided a "Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs" RSS feed created with Yahoo Pipes. And yesterday, on the article about "Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web," we rounded up some of the best Gen Y blogs into one OPML file.

Below you can get access to either the RSS or the OPML files for the feeds we've shared:

ReadWriteWeb 2008 Toolkit OPML Files (Save Each Link to Download File)

• RWW Open Data Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Semantic Web Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Mobile Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Visualization Feed Favorites OPML file

ReadWriteWeb 2008 Toolkit RSS Feeds (Subscribe - Copy & Paste to Your Reader)

• RWW Open Data Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW SemWeb Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Mobile Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Visualization Feeds - Best of Feed

Government Watchdogs OPML (Download Here)

• Wikileaks
• Wikileaks "Best Of"
• Cryptome's Greatest Hits

Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs RSS (Subscribe Here)

• LaughingSquid
• We Make Money Not Art
• Wooster Collective
• EveryoneForever
• WebUrbanist

Gen Y Greatest Hits OPML (Download Here)

• Ypulse
• My Gen Y Life
• Twenty Set
• Our American Shelf Life
• Millennial Leaders
• Lisa's Generation Relations Blog
• Modite
• Life Before Noon
• Generation Y Voodoo
• Personal Branding Blog
• Newly Corporate
• The Marketing Student
• Young and Frugal
• Employee Evolution
• PR Interactive

You can preview these RWW feeds in the widget below:

Bonus Content!

In the past, Marshall had also put together five of his favorite OPML on his personal site.

International Free Speech News (Download Here)

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

• ACLU free speech press releases
• Article 19: Campaign for Global Free Expression
• Index on Censorship
• Institute for War and Peace Reporting
• Amnesty International news

Big Picture Eco News (Download Here)

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

• Popular recent items tagged "environment" in Del.icio.us
• Environmental News Network
• Gristmill, the blog of Grist.org
• Sprol.com, using maps and pictures to examine eco troubles world wide
• Tree Hugger, eco news for the hip and urban 
• WorldChanging, a great group blog on many issues including eco solutions.

Non Profit/Net Squared (Download Here)

Feeds from non profit groups using Web 2.0 tools to share news about the non profit sector.

Contains:

• The 501c3 Cast, a great podcast about non profit work.
• Items tagged Net2 in Del.icio.us, a news wire promoted by Net Squared
• Net Squared Interviews, interviews of folks using Web 2.0 tools explicitly for social good.
• Net Squared Blog, group blog by staff and participants in the Net Squared community.
• Non Profit Online News, long one of the most respected sources on the subject.
• Today in Tech Soup, news from the non profit technology assistance group Tech Soup, parent of Net Squared.

Political Audio (Download Here)

Three of the most moving and informative news audio shows online.

Contains:

• Democracy Now!, a daily hour of powerful media.
• Free Speech Radio News, daily half hour from correspondents around the world.
• The Global Shortwave Report, weekly highlights from English language shortwave radio world wide - a paradigm shaker.

Vlogs - Video Blog (Download Here) 

Contains:

• Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth - Video, world traveling social justice multi media activist.
• Brave New Television
• Geek Entertainment TV, funny interviews with interesting people in the Web 2.0 world
• Vlog - Flux, awesome radical street videography

The site has links to the same categories you would find on the main ReadBurner homepage, including "Popular Stories," "Upcoming Stories," and "Most Recent Stories."

The category you want to view can be selected by entering the corresponding number on your mobile phone's keypad. Also available are links to the ReadBurner blog and the mobilized version of Google Reader, so you can continue your mobile RSS consumption.

After selecting which category of stories you want to read, you are presented with a list of stories, which are also selected by entering a number on your keypad.

When reading the story, there are links to the originating blog, the people who shared the story, and, at the bottom, links to take to you the next post or previous post, back a page, or back to the main ReadBurner mobile homepage.

The posts are formatted well for the small screens, so reading through the news is easy to do.

In addition the standard mobile page (preview it here), there is also a version of the site designed specifically for iPhone users available from http://m.readburner.com/iphone. (Preview here)

ReadBurner mobile may even become your preferred mobile RSS source over Google Reader for two reasons: One, there is no sign-in process like with Google Reader, which requires the necessary step of entering in your Google account credentials in order to view your feeds. And two, you're guaranteed to only see the top news stories instead of whatever random selection is at the top of your hundreds of feeds at the moment.

ReadBurner mobile is a great new site, and its launch shows that the ReadBurner team isn't doing anything halfway when it comes to their new service. Clearly, they're here to compete and are aiming to become your preferred RSS aggregator.

The new program, Inbox 3.0, offers several new features including enhanced relevancy, attention reporting, easy subscription adding, flag synchronization and a redesigned UI.

You may remember back in January, NewsGator began giving away many of their products for free, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and others available here. What you may not have realised is why.

As it turns out, the power of their newly expanded community is being utilized to form the backbone of the company's relevance engine. When you flag an item, email a clipping, save a clipping, etc., this anonymous usage data is sent back to NewsGator. (This was fully disclosed by the company and can be turned off, if desired. Read more in the FAQ).

By combining this "relevance metadata," NewsGator can provide their users, like those using Inbox 3.0, with the most relevant news and information while also keeping track of what subscriptions you care most about and allowing you to export this information in APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) so it can be shared with other services.

If you go to "My Reading Habits," from the toolbar, you have the option to export as either APML or OPML. The APML option sorts your feeding by attention - that is by how much you interact with the feed. This APML file can then be imported into other programs.

Exporting Attention Data

NewsGator's Nick Bradbury is a big proponent of APML, having joined the APML Workgroup back in October. Unfortunately, though, although the program exports APML, there is no import APML feature, nor was there a way to import the APML to my other NewsGator program, FeedDemon. However, according to an older post on Bradbury's blog, import is supposed to be the next step they focus on, so we hope to see import support soon.

In addition to the attention and relevancy improvements, the new version of Inbox 3.0 offers a new UI which is designed to fit in more with Outlook 2007's look and feel, and easy subscription adding. Also, the flag synchronization feature syncs flagged items between different computers running Outlook but also between NewsGator's Mac and PC RSS readers – NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

For many office workers, a good part of the day is spent in Outlook, so Inbox 3.0 will be a nice find for them, especially because the program, like the desktop readers, is free.

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren't on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up?

This morning on the Blog Herald, Jason Kaneshiro, brought up this very topic. When people post an article on a blog these days, the conversations are occurring offsite. The blog link could be submitted to Digg, Mixx, and/or FriendFeed, and conversations may occur around the topic on those sites instead. The original blog post, meanwhile, has 0 comments. Jason asks: "Does this bother you as a blogger? How about as a user?"

He mentions that for many bloggers, the sentiment is that conversation-relocation is detrimental to the blog itself. If no one is commenting on the blog, will the blog lose readers? Will the blog lose traffic? Others feel that bloggers don't own the conversation - let it occur where it may.

Whether you agree or disagree with this sentiment, the real question now is, how can you keep up?

Bloggers today want to know the answers to questions like: Is my article being read? Is it being commented on? Is it being dugg? What are the diggers saying? What do the commenters say? Was it liked on FriendFeed? Did it show up on twitter? What are my friends reading? What are they saying? etc.

Here's How To Keep Up

Before becoming too overwhelmed, it's time to find some solutions. To stay in touch with so many different sources of conversation and activity, let's turn to RSS.

Begin by getting a list of all the feeds you want to keep track of. Here some I recommend, you can pick and choose which ones are right for you:

• Twitter Friends: You can subscribe to your Twitter friends feed, but if you're also going to subscribe to your FriendFeed, which may include Twitter, then you should skip this. Best for Twitter purists only.
• Twitter Replies: Twitter offers you a way to subscribe to your replies only. At the bottom of the Twitter replies is an RSS link to http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss. You'll then need to enter in your Twitter username and password to be authenticated in order to get your feed.
• Twitter Topics: You can use TweetScan to search for any topic on Twitter and create a feed for it. This can be useful for someone who may have forgotten the "@" when replying to you, since you can have it search for just your username or common misspellings of your username.
• FriendFeed: The hottest new thing. Aggregate everything and then pick up your FriendFeed feed from the bottom of your "Friends" page.
• FriendFeed Comment Finder: This great new app was built with Yahoo Pipes and it will create a feed with your FriendFeed comments and people who "liked" your content.
• FriendFeed Minus Twitter: Also from the wonderful Dawn Foster of the comment finder, you can create a Yahoo Pipes feed for your FriendFeed minus your Twitter updates, if you would prefer to keep them separate.
• Facebook Status Updates: Track everything your friends are doing on Facebook. Click on "Friends," then choose the "Status Updates" option. On the right, click "Friends' Status Feed."
• Facebook Posted Items: You can also grab a feed for your friends' posted items from the Posted Items page.
• MySpace: MySpace isn't as giving with their feeds as Facebook, but you can still get one if you're crafty. For example, you can get a feed of your MySpace Comments by following the tutorial at 5ThirtyOne if you want to go this route. MySpace blogs already have feeds if you want to subscribe to any of those.
• Digg: Keep track of your Digg comments with Diggwatch. This application lets you find, browse, and track your digg comments and their replies over the last 14 days. You can track by your username, the username of a friends, or you can track the stories and comments posted from a particular domain. The best part is that the service generates feeds for these items for you.
• Social Site Submission Watch Dog: With this Yahoo Pipe, you can track how your site is being promoted on Digg
• MyBlogLog: You may as well pick up the MyBlogLog lifestream while you're at it, found on your homepage: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/username.
• SocialThing: For those not on FriendFeed, SocialThing is the other aggregating option.
• Flickr: Photographers, don't forget to include your flickr feed to get the latest activity on your photos via RSS. The easiest way to get to this is to go to your Flickr photo page and scroll to the bottom where the "Activity" links are listed. You can also pick up feeds for comments you've made, photos from your groups, or photos from your friends.
• RSSMeme: The problem with RSSMeme is that there isn't a way to just subscribe to a comments feed for any one user (like yourself or your friends) or even a comments feed for the "Popular" stories. You're best bet is to subscribe to the "Popular" feed and then keep an eye out to see if any of your stories or those of your friends make it there.

The final step is to subscribe to all the feeds in your RSS reader of choice, or on your homepage of choice like Netvibes or iGoogle. You can also try to blend them all together as a unified feed, too, using a service like feedblendr.com, and just subscribe to that instead.

I'm curious to know what other RSS feed sources you would include - please suggest some in the comments...or on Twitter...or in FriendFeed...or wherever!