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.

Fabien Penso's fabulous iPhone push notification app released a 3.0 version this year, but it's just the nice clean basics that make this one a winner. Input any feed, or many other sources of information, and Penso's app will push it to your phone in real time. It works really, really well and is better than ever with the introduction of the Apple Notification Center in iOS5. A double digit percentage of the stories I reported on this year came from feeds I consumed in this app. See also: BoxCar and Notifo.

9. iftt

If This Then That is a point and click mashup maker that lets you do all kinds of things with feeds of information and multiple applications. It's loads of fun, though some high-volume RSS feeds seem to overwhelm it. I wish it worked with AppNotifications above, or UrbanAirship. The ifttt recipe that pushes my Foursquare check-ins into my Google Calendar like a diary entry? That's awesome. Ifttt was recently funded by Betaworks, a story I was able to break because of another awesome feed bot - the Neubot VC portfolio tracker.

8. Flipboard

The feed reader your parents always wished you'd bring home, Flipboard finally released its iPhone version this Fall after more than a year of dominating the iPad magazine reader app market. Competitor Zite is nice and was acquired by CNN, Google's new Currents is ok, Yahoo's competitor is not so great and others are floating around too. Flipboard puts a premium on design though and wins as a result. Adoption of its new iPhone app has been breathtaking. The best way to enjoy Flipboard, though, is to populate it with a great Twitter list.

7. Summify

The computer science nerds behind iPhone app Summify have done a great job combining social engineering, smart algorithms and nice design to solve the information overload problem. If you haven't seen Summify, you should check it out. It feels related to the iPad's News.me, which is a strong contender for this spot in the list as well.

6. Path

The story behind Path seems downright smug - the company's founders reportedly turned down $100 million from Google before even launching and they walk through the wasteland of social networking healing the sick with their mere touch, but the latest version of the app is undeniably fantastic. It's like Facebook Mobile meets Instagram meets Foursquare meets Gowalla meets better design than any of the above. Expect to see a giant pile of apps try to model their design after Path's in the next year. It's a great presentation of an activity feed. It's the kind of thing that nerds and noobs can all love, too.

5. Percolate

"Percolate turns brands into curators," this new startup says. Marketers love this service and it seems to have done a great job of discovering feeds full of content and making them easy for Percolate users to add to and capture value from.

4. Feedly

Feedly rides on top of your Google Reader subscriptions and provides a great cross-platform feed reading experience on web, mobile and tablets. When you're ready to stop messing around with filters, social, recommendations, etc. and you just want to stand in front of a pipe of feeds you subscribed to yourself, Feedly is a great way to do it. (Disclosure: The author did a small amount of consulting for Feedly on launch strategy but has no ongoing financial interest in the company, beyond a glowing endorsement of said consulting services. Sorry, but it's still a feed app that lots of people love.)

3. New Twitter Interactions

Love or hate the #newnewTwitter just launched at the end of this year, the new Interactions tab on web and mobile is a great big nod to activity feeds. It's very cool to see all the relevant activity surfaced with regard to your content: you've been replied to, favorited, added to a list, retweeted. Putting all of that in one big feed is really nice and is probably one of the biggest feed changes that tens of millions of people are going to engage with next year. That will make it one of the biggest, except for...

2. The Facebook Timeline

Facebook's new Timeline feature looks at all the activities you've published into the site since creating your account and it surfaces the highlights by analyzing social activity around each event. It's awesome, if a little frightening. Now that hundreds of millions of people will become familiar with this kind of presentation around their data, they'll be all the more ready for...

1. Facebook Seamless Sharing

The biggest thing in feeds for 2011 is clearly Facebook's Seamless Sharing, or Open Graph Protocol. I think the way the company implemented the paradigm is risky, irresponsible and wrong. But it's going to pave the way for a wholly instrumented world. Today the music you listen to is streamed into your social network and profile (unless you opt-out) and in the future almost everything else you do with a machine will be, too. Every machine you use will be network-connected and will publish data onto the web. Remember when Facebook hired "my year in review" infographic artists Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case this Spring? Their work appeared in the aforementioned Facebook Timeline, but they and their thinking will help build dashboards we use to track our home electricity usage, our debit card activity, our exercise, our travel and a whole lot more in the future. It will all be pushed automatically into the network too, just like Facebook's Seamless Sharing.

Hopefully Facebook can move this ball forward in a way that allows users to make clear, informed decisions how to participate - odds of that aren't great - but either way it's likely to happen. And it's going to be very big.

Those are my list of the Top 10 Feed Technologies in 2011 - what do you think? What should be included? Is there too much Facebook here? Please share your comments below.

Disclosure: The author is building an unlaunched startup related to this sector; it may either compete or collaborate with any number of the above companies. Except Facebook, it doesn't have anything to do with Facebook.

Adapting to Your Browsing Habits

What makes Genieo stand out is that it is completely private and completely personal. As a desktop tool (Windows-only for now, but a Mac version is in the works), it is able to watch your surfing habits but doesn't need to relay any of your personal information to a server. Due to this, your privacy is assured and the recommendations are not based on what your friends are reading but purely based on your own surfing habits. As the company's co-founder and CEO Sol Tzvi told us earlier this week, this approach also allows Genieo to learn when you stop being interested in a given topic.

While it doesn't have the visual appeal of Flipboard, Genieo's design works perfectly well. What's most important, though, is that the recommendations are extremely good. After installing the application, Genieo will take a close look at your browsing history to seed its engine. After this, it will constantly update its recommendations and your startpage based on the topics you are currently most interested in. Of course, you can also manually edit the sites it subscribes to and train the algorithm by telling it that a story wasn't interesting to you, but in our own experience, this was hardly ever necessary.

If you want to give the service a try, you can download Genieo for Windows here.

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.

With the official Twitter for iPad application, the process for interacting with Twitter's fast-updating stream of content has been addressed through the use of panes. You tap on tweets to open a pane on the right where you can see the posted video or photo, or, as is often the case on Twitter, the Web page being linked to via someone's status update. There, within this new pane, the content loads.

But the pane can also be pushed off slightly to the side with a swiping motion so that you can continue to browse through the stream of tweets on the left. By the time the content loads on the right (Twitter's blog post puts it well: "let's be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load"), you're ready to skim the news, watch the video, etc. and then you can move on to the tweet you've already queued up to take its place.

Initially, you'll have to figure out how this particular interaction works, but after a minute or two, it will be swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe and you'll quickly become addicted to the flow.

Twitter for iPad: The Bad

The other interactions, unfortunately - like the pinch to view author details or using two fingers to pull down on a tweet and see the entire conversation thread - are slightly less intuitive. Maybe more than slightly, to be honest. There's a learning curve.

For example, you first have to learn how to "properly" tap a tweet. Tap on the tweet itself and you see the right-side pane and its associated content (like the photo, video, news item or even a stream of the hashtag mentioned). Tap accidentally on an @mention within the tweet, however, and you'll end up seeing that person's profile information instead, displayed below the tweet in the right-side pane, and not the associated content. This can get a bit confusing for the new user, and it can easily slow you down too, because you have to focus on where to tap.

The two-finger pull-down has to be done slowly or it flips up like a window shade whose cord you just yanked and let go. The pinch a tweet - well, let's be honest here - someone is going to have to release a YouTube instruction video for that gesture. (Oh, thank you.)

In other words, Twitter for iPad is not perfect. (And no, it didn't just "kill" all the other Twitter applications, the Twitter website, or anything else). It's a good enough app, but it may not be for you.

Beyond the Twitter App: Stream Consumption is the New iPad Trend

But these days, there are plenty of other applications to choose from. We've previously been fans of Twitterific for iPad, but it wasn't exactly ground-breaking in its design. However, other startups, including Pulse, Flipboard, Entertainment Weekly's Must List, ABC News, Reeder and even some interactive iPad magazines like Wired, certainly are. Wired and EW's Must List each present new visions for magazine content on the iPad, both in long form and short. Pulse and Reeder are gorgeous, interactive news readers, and while ABC News may be a bit hokey for you, with its Google Earth-esque spinning globe interface, it's definitely doing something different. Whether its interface ends up winning or losing in the long run is almost besides the point - the point is that new interfaces are possible now, thanks to the iPad.

At the top of the heap today, though, is Flipboard, a social news reading application we recently called "one of the best iPad apps available." In reality, that's selling it a bit short. It's one of the best apps available, period, iPad or not. In comparison with Twitter for iPad, the app clearly excels. There's no learning curve - the entire process is 100% intuitive. And any app that isn't needs to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate whether its special "tweaks" really work.

Twitter for iPad, despite its many innovations, involves several minutes of practice to get it right. You couldn't hand it over to Grandma without a how-to class either. And that's not Grandma's fault - she readily mastered using iPad's built-in photo gallery application despite never owning or using a computer. We would argue that good design makes new interactions simple and intuitive - you don't think, don't don't have to practice and you certainly don't have to watch a video to figure out how you "pinch a tweet." You just swipe, tap, pinch, swipe, and all somewhat mindlessly. Twitter for iPad is a good start and is sure to be a hit among early adopters, and there's no arguing it showcases some innovative ideas, but it's not a home run just yet.

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.

About Ashes

Developed by freelancers James Finley and Tom Krush, Ashes is the first native application built using the API from Fever, which itself was created by designer and developer Shaun Inman.

In order to use Ashes, you have to first have a Fever installation up-and-running. That requirement may be a limiting feature for casual RSS subscribers since Fever is neither a free nor a hosted application. Fever is actually a PHP and MySQL app that runs on your own server and requires a one-time licensing fee of $30. However, for serious RSS consumers, such as those in the blogging biz for example, Fever is an app well worth the investment.

How it Works

The new Ashes app essentially works as an iPad interface to your own Fever database that you've already set up and installed on your server. It syncs your feeds to and from the iPad every 5 minutes, even allowing for offline access, a useful feature for those with Wi-Fi-only iPads who may want to continue reading the feeds even after wandering away from a Wi-Fi hotspot.

The articles in Ashes can be read within the application, thanks to an in-app browser, and a simple sharing feature lets you email articles to a friend or save them for later reading with Instapaper.

Unfortunately, a couple of early reviews in the iTunes App Store hint at issues for this newly-released app, but Finely addresses these on the Ashes blog. He says that there were two bugs which weren't caught during beta testing, one which caused the app to crash and the other which affected the syncing function. The updated version (1.0.1) should fix these bugs and is now available in the App Store.

Going forward, a future version of Ashes will include Twitter and Delicious integration, faster sync, better performance and an iPhone interface.

Ashes is $6.99 and can be found in iTunes here.

Built-in social network integration also allows users to use the service a social dashboard along with the news and media browser. By connecting the app to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, users can monitor the activity of their friends and followers, as well as publish updates to their profiles from the app. The ability to share news items on these social networks is a feature missing from this release of the iPad version, but the company told ReadWriteWeb that more functionality such as this will come in future releases.

Users can also expect to see more visual magazine-style viewing options, premium dashboard branding and the ability to add, remove and change dashboard configurations in the near future. Personally I haven't found myself straying from good ole Google Reader for reading feeds online, and I feel that a web-based iPad-friendly version may not be enough to sway me away. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see Netvibes, or a similar service like Lazyfeed, develop a native application for the iPad that can fully leverage the device's features and APIs.

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.

To create your own personal homepage using sudoSocial, you'll need to have an OpenID account and, the page reminds you, that's probably something you already have - even if you didn't know it. A link to OpenID's "Get an OpenID" page displays a collection of OpenID enabled services like Google, Yahoo, Blogger, flickr, MySpace, WordPress, AOL and others. For our own testing purposes, we used a Google Profile URL. Yours can be found here: http://google.com/profiles/me.

After signing in and filling out a little profile info (if it's the first time you've used an OpenID), you're taken to the Stream Editor where you can begin to add sources. Any URL, Atom or RSS feed is supported.

In the next tab, you can edit the design using CSS, JavaScript and Processing.js. (Oh, yes, did we forget to mention this tool isn't for the mainstream user?)

When you've finished your configurations, you could end up with a webpage that looks something like this: http://sudosocial.me/u/pattyokdemo, if you choose a more basic setup, or like this: http://ozten.com/homepage-demo.html if you design something a bit more advanced.

If you're interested, you can also contribute to the project by hacking the source code, found here: http://github.com/ozten/sudosocial.

A Better Option for Everyday Users: Flavors.me

However, if you were hoping that sudoSocial would provide a simple way to quickly set up a personal homepage, you're going to walk away feeling disappointed. A better option for that purpose, or really any stream aggregation of your choosing, is Flavors.me.

This lovely, user-friendly web service lets you customize everything design-wise, including typefaces, layouts and color schemes while also aggregating the feeds of your choice. And for most of the supported services (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr, etc.), you don't even need to know the RSS's feed URL - you simply click "add service" and authorize the app.

That said, sudoSocial isn't designed with the mainstream user in mind. It's intended as a more advanced platform for designers and developers who know what they want and how to make it happen via code. For them, sudoSocial may be a good starting point, but it still needs quite a bit of polish and bug-quashing before it's fully ready for a wider audience.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_launches_sudosocial_an_experimental_lifestream_platform.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_launches_sudosocial_an_experimental_lifestream_platform.php Lifestreaming Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:04:06 -0800 Sarah Perez 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.

The Fliptop service is available in two formats - one designed for website publishers and another designed for web surfers. The first provides an embeddable button that publishers can add to their site. When clicked, this button prompts the user as to which topics they want to follow. A sports site could set it up so fans could just check boxes next to their favorite team names, for instance. Another option below the checkboxes lets you further refine the content you choose by keyword filters. So, here on ReadWriteWeb.com, for example, you could follow news about "mobile, real-time web, apple" etc. (Keywords are separated by commas).

After picking your options, you click "Next" and then choose how you want to be alerted - either via a traditional RSS feed or by email, Twitter, Facebook, or SMS text. If choosing the email option, you can even configure how often you want to be alerted - once per day, once a week or immediately.

For Consumers

However, you don't have to rely on publishers to begin using Fliptop before you can try it. A browser bookmarklet is available which lets you drag-and-drop a Fliptop button to your web browser's bookmarks. Click the new "Subscribe" button it creates when you're on any page that has an RSS feed (look for the orange icon in the address bar of your browser). When clicked, you can configure how you want to follow that site. At the moment, your only options here are email or RSS.

The service is simple, incredibly easy to use and useful for anyone who feels overwhelmed by their news feeds. (Gadget blog readers, rejoice! This product is perfect for you!).

The only downside to the service as it stands right now is that it requires you to fill out CAPTCHAs when signing up. These spam blocking tools force you to type in the blurry words you see into a text box before confirming your subscription. And if requesting an email subscription, you then have to click yet another confirmation sent to you via email to assure Fliptop that you really did want to subscribe. We appreciate that the company is looking out for us, but two confirmations is at least one too many for what should be a speedier service, in our opinion.

Will Fliptop Make Website Subscriptions More Mainstream?

The real question now is whether something like Fliptop will encourage more people to follow a website's content via an automated mechanism, be it a customized, filtered RSS feed or an email digest. The idea of subscribing to a website directly via an RSS feed is one that, for whatever reason, never quite caught on with the general public. However, those same folks probably use RSS without even knowing it - like when they follow their favorite blog on Facebook, for example. The updates they track there are, in most cases, automated via RSS technology.

Fliptop could potentially reach these same sort of non-technical users too, thanks to its simple terminology (publisher buttons say "follow" not "subscribe"), a clean layout and easily understandable filtering options. Now it's just a matter of waiting to see if any web publishers pick this up and place it on their site.

As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and "like." You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader.

Play will even work if you don't have a Google account. While you can't star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don't want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds.

Get Started

To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for "View in Reader Play" in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second.

Update: Our original reporting was based on the increased speed we and other bloggers noticed yesterday. We have now received confirmation from a Google spokesperson that our informed guess was indeed correct. Google will post an update about this news in the next few days. We have updated this post to reflect this new development.

From Slow to Real Time

Bloggers and readers started to complain about Google Reader's delays shortly after Google launched the service in its current form, but until today, Google hadn't really done anything to address these complaints.

Google began to publish real-time feeds for shared Google Reader items in August 2009. Until now, however, Google did not consume the real-time updates from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds, even though most of Google's own blogs and FeedBurner now publish in real time. Google's App Engine, too, offers support for PubSubHubbub and some of the most popular real-time notifications bots are hosted on App Engine.

It's important to note that these real-time updates (assuming our observations and those from other bloggers turn out to be true) will only work for PubSubHubbub-enabled blogs. One of the major problem with Google Reader is that it pings relatively obscure feeds very infrequently and this won't change anytime soon if these feeds don't support real-time updates yet.

How to Enable PubSubHubbub on Your Blog

If you use WordPress and want to enable PubSubHubbub on your own blog, you can do so by installing the PubSubHubbub Wodpress plugin. By default, every blog on Blogger and Posterous already supports PubSubHubbub. Update: we mistakenly reported that WordPress.com blogs use the PubSubHubbub protocol, but WordPress.com actually uses the rssCloud format, which Google doesn't currently support.

If you're using Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds, you can also turn on Google's PingShot service and sent out PubSubHubbub announcements in real time.

Thanks to this, you can easily track the latest discounts on Macys.com or updates to Zillow.com's homepage.

As far as we were able to see, Google Reader creates very clean RSS feeds for these items. While Google doesn't make it obvious, you can find the newly created feed by clicking "show details" in Google Reader. Thanks to this, you can subscribe to this new feed in any feed reader and not just in Google Reader.

There are, of course, a number of other sites that also allow you to track when something changes on a site. ChangeDetection.com, for example, is a popular online service that will alert you whenever a page changes. Unlike Google Reader's new feature, ChangeDetection.com also gives you a very detailed overview of of what exactly changed and what the page looked like before. The service also offers an RSS feed of these changes.

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?

While many of us use Google Alerts and apps like LazyFeed to track keywords and topics, that's still a relatively geeky thing to do.

In a follow-up post in January 2005, entitled Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS, I wrote that "tools will evolve to let people easily set-up personalized searches for information relevant to them and subscribe to the results [using RSS]." I wasn't suggesting that conversations or people are unimportant. On the contrary, as I explained in '05, "topic/tag/remix feeds will make it even easier to find the conversations that matter to you and indeed you are more likely to meet new people and discover new points of view."

That has certainly happened, but not so much due to RSS - more because of Facebook and Twitter. While RSS did expand over those 5 years, social networking services became much more popular as ways to track information.

Also, online media has matured a lot over the past 5 years. Nowadays people commonly subscribe to blogs and other news media across a variety of niches - and that's how they keep up-to-date on topics of interest to them. For example, I subscribe to NPR All Songs Considered and Pitchfork (amongst other sites) to get the latest alternative music news.

Both of these trends (the rise of the Social Graph; and maturing of professional niche media) have made topic feeds from the likes of Google Alerts less attractive than I thought they'd be 5 years ago.

However, I still believe in the promise of topic-based RSS feeds. Indeed I currently use a number of services to track a set of topics of interest to me. One is Google Alerts, which I have set up as RSS feeds in Google Reader. Plus I use a couple of services that launched just recently, LazyFeed and Regator.

Sadly, the promising services of 2005 - such as PubSub and Feedster - haven't made it as far as 2010 (although last year PubSub was born again under new management).

It's possible that LazyFeed and Regator won't last either, but let's hope that a startup soon finds the key to unlock the potential of topic feeds.

In the meantime I'm curious to know if you subscribe to topic feeds? If so which tools, if any, do you use to track topics? Please leave a comment. I'll write a follow-up post later this week, highlighting the best apps that are mentioned.

Image credit: shizhao

Related: Top Tools For Tracking Topics on the Web

To test the product visit netvibes.com.

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).