The biggie, at least from my viewpoint, is the tagging. Feedly has always supported saving articles for later, but you just end up with a huge pile of items. Finding that really interesting piece on running a startup from last July can be tricky with no way to organize items except chronologically.

With F8, Feedly now has a rudimentary tagging system so you can group articles. I say rudimentary because at the moment, it only seems to support a single tag per item. When I'm tagging items in Evernote or other systems, I often use two or more tags. (Like "tickler" for article ideas and a relevant topic like "javascript" or "hadoop.") But at least now I can separate items into some sort of order, so that if I want to dig out a piece on Vim from six months ago it should be easier than scrolling through six months of saved items.

The other thing missing here is that you apparently can't assign tags using Feedly's excellent keyboard shortcuts. If you're used to plowing through articles using the keyboard shortcuts, you'll still have to slow down and get clicky to add a tag.

Tags are private now, but expect more goodies based around tagging with Feedly 9. According to the F8 announcement post, with Feedly 9 you'll be able to "selectively publish and share your collections." Sounds just a little like the old days of goodness with Delicious, before that service was sucked up and derailed after years of neglect by Yahoo. (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)

Views

Feedly has always had a number of different "views" you could use to browse your feeds. With Feedly 8, it adds a card view and a new titles view that displays more information for each item. The card view calls to mind a set of index cards, with the text-only posts just having the item title, summary and byline/publication info. Posts with graphics display all the summary info plus a random graphic from the post.

The so-called infinite view comes into play when you have a lot of items in your feeds. Instead of stopping at an arbitrary number of posts, you can simply keep scrolling through items as long as you have more posts to read.

If you haven't tried Feedly before, this would be a good time to check it out. You don't need to have a Google Reader account, there's a default set of feeds you can skim with Feedly even if you're not signed in. But I do recommend using it in conjunction with Google Reader. Note that Feedly syncs in real time with Google Reader, so changes made in Feedly should reflect in Google Reader as well.

The update is available immediately for Chrome and Safari, but the Firefox version is currently under review. Note that you can still install it, but you'll be warned that it could "harm your computer." For the cautious, I've installed Feedly 8 and thus far my computer seems unharmed.

One of those disappointed users was Web developer Emmanuel Pire. Not content to see the beloved sharing feature go away, Pire built a replica of it on his own server and wrote a script that adds a "Share" button to the new Google Reader interface. This workaround doesn't restore the functionality 100%, but it comes pretty close.

Finally, it's worth noting that the following instructions will not restore the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet or the "Share with note" button. For many users, the back-and-forth comments on shared items was a central part of the social experience. That's still missing, but the sharing part can be restored. It actually works quite well.

How to Get the "Share" Button back

To restore the "share" button in Google Reader, follow these steps:

1. Go to this page using Chrome or Firefox and hit the green "Install" button in the upper right. (You'll need to have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox first.)
2. Go to Google Reader. You should now see a "Share" button in the upper right (not where it used to be, but this'll do). There's also a box in the left column that lets you add friends. Note: This feature will only work if your friends also install the script.
3. Click on the "Share" button in the upper right (you may need to have an item open to see the button). You'll be asked to set a password and confirm your email address. Do both of these things.
4. Email your old Google Reader friends and excitedly ask them to join you. They'll all need to install the script and follow these steps as well. You might as well just send them a link to this article.
5. Once everyone is signed up, you can search for them in the "Add friends by email" box on the left. If they're taking their sweet time, you can bug them via email from this box as well.
6. As you find and subscribe to people, you may want to add them all to a folder. Create a new folder called "Friends" or "Shared Items" and be sure to put everybody's feeds in there.
7. Use Google Reader just as you used to, hitting the new "Share" button each time you come across something you'd like your friends to see.

Again, this workaround only brings things about 90% back to normal. Some things, like building an inline commenting feature, are a bit trickier for a third party developer to implement. As an alternative, you can always hit the "+1" button to publicly share it or you can hit the "Share" button to send the item to your newly-resurrected Google Reader network.

So how does this work? Pire realized that the old sharing feature was essentially a glorified RSS feed to which others could subscribe. His hack generates a feed containing any item on which you click "Share" and then allows your friends to subscribe to that feed. He requires users to set a password so that others can't inject items and effectively share them on your behalf.

We tried it out with a few of our old Reader pals and it comes pretty close to replicating the original functionality. Give it a try and lets us know in the comments what you think.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Internet of Things - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Alternatives to Google Reader? Don't Bother, You're Not Going Anywhere...

Google+ is getting added to lots of Google products and Google Reader, a favorite RSS reader, got plussed this week. The changes caused some readers to lament the loss of a beautiful workflow that was no longer possible sans multiple sharing options. And, by the way, sorry, but there are no real alternatives to Google Reader, though readers did point to several that were worth a look (see the comments on this thread).

Tristan's response sums up most of the comments I saw. It's long, but it's a good example of how people were using Google Reader and why they are disappointed with this change.

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The concerns echoed sentiments that were by then flooding Twitter and other nooks and crannies of the Web. In the process of redesigning Reader, the team decided to kill off the social features long beloved by many power users of the service. Suddenly, friending, sharing and commenting were all gone, as was the outbound RSS feed of shared items each user generated.

Putting the User Last

It may not have been an overwhelmingly huge number of people that were using the "Share" and "Share With Comment" buttons on the old Google Reader, but those that did were doing so on a regular basis, probably for several years.

What developed over time was a sort of mini-social network of people sharing and discussing content. It was smaller and more contained than Twitter or Facebook, with a sharper focus on discovery and discussion.

In my own Google Reader network, I personally had quite a few real-world friends, a few former colleagues and some Internet acquaintances, such as Wall Street Journal social media guru Zach Seward, who always shared really interesting stuff on Reader.

By taking away the service's social features, Google stamped out that miniature network entirely. I can still find those people on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or elsewhere, but that little social ecosystem we had is now gone. Lights out.

Google clearly wants Reader users to move on over to Google Plus, where the company rightfully points out that we can create new circles and share our content that way. And hey, Google has every right to do whatever it wants with its free services. Some folks have used the product for five or six years and never paid a dime to do so.

Still, there's something about this approach that just feels reckless, if not somewhat arrogant on Google's part. For better or worse, users of Web services feel a certain sense of empowerment and even entitlement. They know that if the company running the service they love so much screws up or wrongs them in anyway, they have the power to put them out of business. That may be dramatically less true with giants like Google and Facebook, but just because they're immune from the crowd doesn't mean they should ignore it all together.

Another Social Flub For Google?

Google is known for making decisions informed by data, often very large sets of it. That's a great practice, and one that undoubtedly often leads to some smart moves and happy users.

In this case, the Reader team probably saw that a relatively small number of people were using those features, and decided that it was probably safe to kill them off in favor of pushing users toward Google Plus, which is a big, new priority for the company.

It's ironic in a way, because in its big push to reposition itself as a social-friendly company, Google just displaced an entire community of users, effectively shutting down a social ecosystem that had existed for years.

In the end, Google may well see Plus flourish into a massive, widely-used social network and Reader users may forget how mad they were about yesterday's changes. Who knows, perhaps with tighter integration, Google Reader could ride the coattails of its socially-savvy big sister toward something resembling mainstream adoption.

It's not as though integrating Reader with Plus is a bad idea, by any means. But whenever you have a community of passionate users who use and love your product, taking away features should be done cautiously and with a very strong, clearly-explained justification. For many users of Google Reader, the way this was executed didn't meet those criteria. If nothing else, there are a few lessons to be learned here for the company's next product launch.

But are there in fact any viable alternatives to Google Reader?

So Google knows full well that most people will either stick with Google Reader, or still have a connection to it. If users do stick with Reader (by far the most likely scenario), they will use Plus a lot more now that it's the only way to share.

RSS Readers Ain't What They Used To Be

This is another key turning point for RSS Readers, perhaps the final innovation in this long struggling market. No longer are RSS Readers independent products with their own devoted, reading-focused users - or "word-y people" as one Google Reader fan described them on my G+ profile.

Sure, the writing was already on the wall. Formally popular consumer RSS Readers like Bloglines and Newsgator have by now either disappeared, morphed into new products, or became focused on markets that will pay for them (which usually means the enterprise market).

The RSS Reader market has declined because reading content is a very fragmented experience these days. That was my conclusion even back in 2009, when I cited the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Nearly two years later and the fragmentation has only multiplied. As well as Twitter and Facebook, there are tablet-focused apps such as Flipboard and News.me, services like Instapaper and ReadItLater which make it even easier to read articles on mobile devices, and newly popular social services - like Google Plus.

Where To Now For The Google Reader Community? Google Plus Of Course...

Even despite all of the changes in the way people consume content on the Web, Google Reader had been the holdout as a specialist RSS Reader product. It has (had?) a passionate community of RSS Reader fanatics.

While RSS reading as an activity will continue in Google Reader, as of today the sharing features have been "retired" and moved to Google Plus. Also the note-taking features. And because almost all community activity happens on social networks - like Google Plus - that effectively spells the end of any real innovation in the RSS Reader market.

So what of these supposed alternatives to Google Reader? In fact, many of them rely on Google Reader. Google Reader powers - or its content can be plugged into - a number of the products that have forced the likes of Bloglines and Newsgator out of the consumer RSS market. Services like Flipboard for the iPad (Google Reader is one content input option) and Feedly (multi-platform, but one of its core features is that it syncs with Google Reader).

So even if Google Reader users migrate to another product, they'll likely still be connected to Google Reader in some way.

May As Well Get Used To It

Louis Gray positioned the changes today as giving Google Reader users more granular ways to share things, by way of the circles feature of Plus. So, for example, you might share a technology post in Google Reader to your "Tech Friends" circle. That does sounds appealing to me. And already in my tests I've seen how easy it is to share things from Google Reader to Plus.

So for people like me, where Google Plus is my (Google-related) social network anyway, the Reader changes are a positive thing. As for Google Reader's avid fans, I feel for them - they have lost some beloved features. But they will simply have to get used to the changes, because there are no real alternatives left in the consumer RSS Reader market.

But it's not all plusses on Google Reader today. Reader's social features, beloved by some avid readers who didn't want the noise of sharing on full-fledged social networks, are now switched off. No more friending, following and sharing; it's all circling and +1s now.

The changes don't really remove any functionality, either (edit: except note-taking. Did you know Google Reader had note-taking?), but they do force those who like to share via Google Reader to join Plus. Shuttering features that have devoted users, even if it isn't many, is always a bold move.

"Retiring Reader's sharing features wasn't a decision that we made lightly," says engineer Alan Green in Google's blog post, "but in the end, it helps us focus on fewer areas, and build an even better experience across all of Google."

But it seems like Google has had it out for Reader for a while now. In January, it demoted Reader below the fold in Gmail. Google's essence is social now, and standalone Reader users have to join the party.

The close-knit sharing between avid readers was nice, but there are clear advantages to sharing on Google Plus, not the least of which is the fact that +snippets are much more attractive to click on than simple Google Reader links. For those mourning the loss of their Google Reader communities, wouldn't creating a Google Reader circle do the trick?

Although, it sure is lame that Google didn't make it easy to convert your Reader friends into a circle automatically.

For anyone who doesn't use Google Plus, there are some amazing RSS clients that use your Google Reader as the back-end but let you share however you'd like. And you know you can still add all your preferred sharing services to the 'Send To' tab, right? The same settings we showed you before to add Google Plus as a Reader service will let you add anything else, too.

Did you use Google Reader's social features? How do you feel about the changes?

If you're a Google Reader user who likes sharing links with other Google Reader users, you're going to have to get used to +1ing everything instead. Most people aren't Google Reader users, though. Most people have not experienced the life-changing, world-affirming joy that is a good RSS reading experience. Google Plus has already caught on far, far more than Google Reader. It's sad, but it's true.

Above: No more sharing the blog of Mr. Hank Williams, WhyDoesEverythingSuck.com, it must now be +1ed.

What do you think of this change? As a non-user of Google Reader myself (I use Fever, SimplePie, Feedly, Flipboard, App Notifications and other services to read my RSS feeds), I feel a mix of cynicism and indifference.

I'd love to know what other readers here think about this and what it all means, though.

RSS, if you're not familiar, is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, a technology that delivers streams of content from a nearly infinite variety of selected sources typically into a central reading experience like an RSS reader.

It is like a magic spell that calls together knowledge from the winds of the Internet into a swirling, dancing chimera that sits in your hand and shares with you the whispers of more people than you'll ever meet in your life - on demand at any time. RSS readers are instruments of magic. When you use them you become a magician. May they proliferate across the land.

I guess if you want to bonk the feeds over the head with a crude +1, Facebook Like or other undifferentiated grunt, that's your business.

Disclosure: Google Plus bought my love by including me on its list of Suggested Users, sending me tens of thousands of new friends. I am now in love with it and incapable of uncompromised critical thought about it.

But Google Plus is built around sharing, and one of Google's best sharing services is missing: Google Reader. It's the free RSS reader that lets anyone subscribe to any website's feed, and it's behind some of the most popular RSS client apps, like Feedly. But there's no built in way to share articles from Google Reader with your circles on Plus. Fortunately, you can make one pretty easily. Here's how.

1. Go to Google Reader, click the gear icon, and choose 'Reader settings'
   
   



2. Click the 'Send To' tab
   
   



3. Scroll down all the way and click 'Create a custom link'
   
   



4. Enter the following into the fields that appear:
   
   Name: Google+
   URL: https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=${url}
   Icon URL: https://ssl.gstatic.com/s2/oz/images/favicon.ico
   
   



5. Click 'Save,' and Google+ will appear checked, with the nice icon next to it:
   
   

Now, when you go back to Google Reader and click on any article, you'll see Google+ in the 'Send to' drop-down menu at the bottom.


Clicking this will open a new window to add that article as a +snippet, which you can share with any circles or individuals you choose on Google Plus. That's it!


Not all blog posts will turn into nice +snippets, but that's up to the site from which you're sharing. Until Google creates some simple integration of these services, this method will have to do. Once it's set up, though, it's easy to share your Google Reader articles with your Plus-buddies.

Are you new to Google Plus? Check out Dan Rowinski's excellent introduction, How To Use Google Plus.

Thanks to How-To New for finding those share-to URLs.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_share_google_reader_stories_to_google_plus.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_share_google_reader_stories_to_google_plus.php Google Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:34:00 -0800 Jon Mitchell RSS feeds were a big driver of innovation in the Web 2.0 era. RSS Readers like Bloglines, Newsgator and Google Reader became the go-to services for people to subscribe to the latest news and blog posts. Over the past couple of years, mobile phones have become a major content consumption device. Yet RSS Readers have struggled to make the transition. In part this has been due to the increased importance of Twitter and Facebook for circulating news and information. But it's also because tracking RSS feeds on your smartphone is a user interface challenge - and few, if any, startups have solved it.

This is the third post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. The first post explored the thriving world of music on smartphones and yesterday we looked at news apps on the iPad. Today we analyze RSS on smartphones.

]]> Most Popular Mobile RSS Readers Amongst RWW Readers

To get a sense of what is currently popular, I polled followers of our @RWW Twitter account - along with followers of my own personal Twitter account @ricmacnz - about their favorite mobile RSS Reader.

5 services stood out as being the most popular among our readers. They were, in alphabetical order:

• Feedly (iPhone / Android)
• Google Reader (optimized for mobile in the browser)
• my6sense (iPhone / Android)
• Pulse (iPhone / Android)
• Reeder (iPhone)

mobileRSS (iPhone) and Byline (iPhone) were also mentioned multiple times.

User Experience of Mobile RSS Readers

Of the top 5 services according to RWW readers, the mobile version of Google Reader is the most conventional. It lists out your folders and feeds, then you click on them to scan and view stories. It works fairly well, although the main issue is that it's not as easy to scan stories as it is on a PC. That's not the fault of Google Reader. Rather it's the much smaller screen space on a smartphone, which means you end up spending a lot of time swiping and scrolling.

That in a nutshell is why RSS Readers have struggled to get take-up on smartphones. It's just too much work on a mobile phone to use an RSS Reader as it is intended, to scan hundreds or even thousands of feeds.

The other 4 services in our top 5 list have taken more innovative approaches to solve this problem. Although it should be noted that 3 of them use Google Reader as a platform for the actual feeds (Pulse is the only one not to).

My6sense filters your feeds and attempts to automatically select the most "relevant" stories to you. It also offers a time-based list of feeds and stories, but its main reason for being is to convert you to the relevance filter. So far this new type of feed reading hasn't taken off in a big way. It reminds me of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" option, in that you have to trust that the software will deliver you the results you want. I wonder whether modern Web users have the patience to build up that trust in my6sense.

Another app taking an innovative approach to mobile RSS Readers is Feedly, a personal favorite of ReadWriteWeb's resident RSS expert Marshall Kirkpatrick. Marshall reviewed Feedly in January, noting its "attractive folder-based navigation that's easy to thumb through horizontally." Similar to my6sense, Feedly filters your feeds. In Feedly's case, it uses a popularity metric to pick out key items. For example, in my 'Internet of Things' folder from Google Reader, Feedly selected two pages worth of items to show me (9 items, to be exact).

Work in Progress

In conclusion, it's fair to say that RSS reading on smartphones is not yet a solved problem. There is no efficient way to scan through hundreds of feeds on a mobile phone, so apps like my6sense and Feedly have chosen to take a filtering approach.

It's partly a software issue. Filtering is a mix of art and science; it's hard to get it right. But also it's a shift in user experience. RSS Readers never really became mainstream on computers and those who do use them - power users or people who need to track information for their job - haven't yet become comfortable with RSS Readers filtering their feeds. Web users have become accustomed to letting people filter information via Twitter or Facebook, so perhaps it's just a matter of time before they let software do filtering too.

Let us know in the comments if you use an RSS Reader on your smartphone; and if so what your experience has been like.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mobile_rss_readers_whats_popular_what_works.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mobile_rss_readers_whats_popular_what_works.php UX Evolutions Thu, 31 Mar 2011 01:08:08 -0800 Richard MacManus Last week we reported on the demotion of the link to Google Reader below the "more" fold inside Gmail, asking whether it was part of a general trend away from enthusiasm about RSS. That made me very sad, because it decreased the likelihood of casual discovery of this fabulous technology. Now it turns out that Google says (via Twitter, not on its blog or feed!) that the move was a mistake and will be returned soon, possibly as early as today.

Alexia Tsotsis wrote last night that the company determines the placement of services in the toolbar by popularity, and the Picasa photo sharing service was correctly added, but according to a Google representative it should have been in addition to and not instead of Reader. In celebration of the good news, perhaps we should all send the following video, Common Craft's intro to RSS, to a friend in need of a life changing web technology. It's easy to be snarky about peoples' supposed over-reaction to the demotion of a link, it's another matter to recognize a valuable tool and share it with others.

]]> ]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_link_will_be_returned_from_demotion.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_link_will_be_returned_from_demotion.php Google Mon, 24 Jan 2011 09:14:44 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Google has quietly moved the link to access Google Reader, its online RSS reader service, below the top level navigation fold for Gmail users. Some Google Reader users are complaining about the move as an inconvenience, but the biggest loss will be to those users who have yet to start using Reader.

The Picasa photo service has replaced Reader in navigation bar. Reader is now the first option that appears when a user clicks "more." While this will likely decrease the frequency with which new users discover the magic that is RSS, it's probably also a recognition that the service isn't being used as enthusiastically as anyone had hoped. It may also be related to the fact that Picasa generates revenue for Google and Reader does not.

]]> While following publishers on Facebook or Twitter has become the most popular way for web users to subscribe to content from chosen sources, there's something tragic about each step RSS takes further into the background. An acronym for Really Simple Syndication, RSS really is very simple. It's also incredibly powerful and full of rich potential.

Firefox recently announced that it too would be moving the RSS feed icon button to the background of its browser by default. Browser extensions are already available to resolve all these problems for users who consider them a problem - the biggest issue is for those who won't even know what they've lost.

As someone who has used RSS daily and in many, many ways, ever since my discovery of the technology changed my life and set me out into this wonderful new career I have - I struggle to articulate its importance, its potential and why it ought to be moved to the foreground, not the background, of the web use experience.

Perhaps this will help: RSS is a simple, flexible, powerful way to bring new content from sites all around the web to one place, as soon as it's available, without going to look for it. It's a magical, automated, completely personalized river of news.

It doesn't depend on someone else Tweeting about it, it's a tool that you can do all kinds of things with. Perhaps most people aren't interested in doing much with the web besides reading articles, playing games, watching videos and posting photos. Surely there are millions and millions of people who feel otherwise, though, and RSS is a great tool for doing more.

For more, see these articles:
How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet About Any Topic
Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader

RSS reader guy picture from FastIcon.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_gets_a_demotion.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_gets_a_demotion.php Google Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:46:37 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick "RSS is Dead", tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that's not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.

If you're not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you've subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.

]]> There are a lot of repeat appearances from 2009 and 2008, but there are some new tools, too. Did we miss any thing important or exciting? Any power user tips you'd add?

Flipboard

Selected coverage: Flipboard, New "Social" iPad Magazine will be Powered by Semantic Data


Flipboard is a well-funded iPad app that turns Twitter and other streams of content into a beautiful "customized magazine." Many people have tried to go deep on the visual impact of feed reading on the iPad, but none have embraced the possibilities as gracefully as Flipboard.

You know how I use Flipboard? I read my usual Twitter and Facebook streams through it sometimes, but it's the curated topical Twitter lists that work best on this service. I've got a Twitter list of hundreds of geotechnology pros that serve up incredible topical links. The Twitter list of anthropologists I grabbed from Tlists? What a great magazine they make every Sunday morning!

Web page pre-loading in the background, integrated social media sharing and commenting, video, image collages - the user experience is really hard to beat and it's only getting better. OPML import is the only thing that the 15 of us in the world that like to play with OPML files could ask for more.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Some people have the audacity to complain that this magical creature that turns links to their website into shining, seductive, glossy magazine pages for iPad using readers to slide right down into their websites... is violating their copyrights! That's the dumbest thing I've heard since someone told me that the tens of thousands of readers a Huffington Post link to our site sends are somehow a case of that site stealing from us, too.

Postrank
Selected coverage: How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet on Any Topic

RSS overload getting you down? Give Postrank a feed and it will give you back a brighter day. This service, which has been on our best of list every year we've written one about feeds, is invaluable. You plug in a feed and Postrank will score every item in it based on the relative social media engagement that item has seen (comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter and a lot more). Then, you can subscribe to a filtered feed of just the most-discussed items on any feed.

We use Postrank about 15 different ways here at ReadWriteWeb. It's awesomeness cannot be surpassed. Watch this space, you'll see us use it some more ways in the coming weeks and months.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Postrank's main home page is now a publisher analytics fancy service. If you want to run other peoples' feeds through it, like a sophisticated strategic thinker able to defer immediate gratification for one technology step in exchange for far greater opportunities, then visit http://postrank.com/main.

Notify.me
Selected coverage: Real Time as a Service? Check Out What Notify.me Is Working On

The battlefield of RSS to IM/SMS/email delivery and alert services is littered with bodies - the field of battle between those services and the cold reality of monetization, that is. There are a small number of people who appreciate the delivery of a substantial number of RSS feeds within minutes of their publication, but it's not an insignificant number. It's services like this that keep all the tech blogs you read feeling fresh, readers. Other people in other fields are learning to appreciate them as well.

Notify.me remains alive, despite its own determination to die this summer. The company is now focused on selling advanced services to large, paying customers; it's expensive shooting RSS feeds all over the web by IM and SMS for free.

In July, 2010, the Notify.me team threw up its hands and said it was shutting down its free consumer service. A minor cry for help arose and thankfully, the company changed its mind. It said it was going to start charging people a small amount of money. It doesn't appear to have done so and the messages are still coming.

Let me tell you what a service like this is good for, outside a journalist's immediate interest: I once led a workshop for non-profit organizations where one participant worked in communications at a local women's advocacy organization. In that workshop, we grabbed the RSS feed for the New York Times and we ran it through a filter, filtering for keywords related to the field she worked in. We then took that filtered feed and we put it through Notify.me, setting it for multiple forms of delivery.

The plan, then, was for her to get an SMS whenever the New York Times wrote a story related to women's issues. She could take a look at it, and if appropriate, could call the local newspaper people she knew. "I don't know if you've heard," she could say (they probably hadn't, so soon), "but there's this story breaking on a national level. If you're interested in a local angle, our Executive Director is an excellent source and would be happy to get on the phone with you if you like." The reporter has been looking for something to write about all day and you lay a timely, high-quality interviewee in their lap. Boom! Now repeat a few times and what have you got? You've got an organization that people in your area associate with the issue because you're regularly cited as a source in the local media - because you were the first to know.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It's not dead yet. Someday it probably will be. Another service will have to take its place, or we'll all have to learn how to roll our own.

SuperFeedr
Selected coverage: The Dream Team Quietly Gathering Behind Real-Time Service SuperFeedr

You've got online content and you want it in real time. You want it in different formats. You want it marked up with geolocation data that corresponds to place names occurring in free text. You want it all and you want it for a fair price. What does it mean? Maybe you want SuperFeedr. It's like FeedBurner was for bloggers, but much more developer-focused. The company adds features all the time and founder Julien Genestoux is one of the most agile technologists you'll find online.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Barely born yet, but backed by BetaWorks and Mark Cuban, that's good for something. Plus Genestoux builds features so fast that he'll likely fit whatever need real-time feed geeks find they have, well into the future.

Google Reader
Selected coverage: Facebook Could Become World's Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)

If you read RSS feeds and you know it, you probably use Google Reader. It's ok. It's pretty good, even. It's not that exciting, but it serves a whole lot of people very reliably and capably. It has survived while everyone else has not. This year we saw former market-leader Bloglines and former innovation leader Newsgator Online close up their RSS readers and send everyone to Google Reader instead. Other services use Google Reader as a place to sync up.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Google almost never kills anything, and there have to be a lot of people internally at the company who depend on Google Reader, too. Unless they've all given it up for Twitter.

My6Sense
Selected coverage: My6Sense & The Geek Who Rode His Blog to the Edge of the World

You're on your phone and you want something good to read? They say that small screens lend to high-quality recommendations of well-targeted content - so why would we read Twitter and Facebook?

My6Sense is a mobile RSS reader that syncs with your Google Reader account (all of it, not just the first one thousand feeds like so many imitations!) and then watches how you interact with the items. It knows when you are reading, it knows when you've shared a link. It then offers two views of all your subscriptions: their most recent posts and the My6Sense recommended posts. The service learns from your behavior over time and offers a quality mobile feed reading experience.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It's probably a slow burn, the company is focusing on monetizing a commercial API. That's a good business to be in.

Blekko
Selected coverage: How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job

Blekko calls itself a search spam killer but it's got a whole lot more potential for the power user.

Blekko is a platform for collaboratively edited vertical custom search engines. It eats OPML files, among other things, and its outputs include RSS feeds. You want a feed of updates from 10 key medical sites whenever any news about a particular issue is written about? Blekko can do that. You want to track a collection of blogs that cover a particular topic and get a ping when they write about one company, one concept or one keyword across all their blogs? No problem. It's great.

A custom search engine creation service with RSS feeds. That deserves a place on this list.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It just launched. When it launched, I said it was too beautiful to live long, but its CEO has been around the block many times and tells me he knows what he's doing.

Facebook
All RWW coverage of Facebook

Facebook's syndicated updates from friends, families and media organizations are the single most important way that hundreds of millions of people around the world relate to the power of the feed. The company tried to do a lot this year, but it's hard to know how drastic the users' experience will end up being. None the less: Facebook Places alone represents the introduction of a radical new type of knowledge into many peoples' lives (where the people you know are right now) - and it's coming to them by feed.

OStatus
Selected coverage: Run Your Own Twitter Clone: Status.net Launches Public Beta

When you hear about Diaspora, when you hear about Status.net, OStatus is what's under the hood. This open-source amalgamation of communication technology standards is like Twitter for networks that are disconnected, but interoperable. "People on Different Networks Following Each Other" is the OStatus slogan.

What does it mean? Interoperability means social networks compete on features, not control over your friends, because switching costs are removed. You lose nothing if you switch networks.

OStatus didn't take off like a Tweeting rocket ship this year, but it saw some continued growth, development and attention. Someday, maybe someday, the asynchronous micro-messaging that so many of us find so much value in will break out of the clutches of one single company (wonderful as you are, dear Twitter) and become a real communication platform like the telephone. That's probably as crazy as imagining a time when AT&T customers can call Verizon customers though, isn't it?

Not Dead Yet Factor: It's not dead yet.

Dapper
Selected coverage: How Yahoo's Latest Acquisition Stole & Broke My Heart

Point and click on almost any field on almost any Web page and Dapper will give you an RSS URL you can use to subscribe to updates from that field, if and when the content there changes. It sounds like a simple thing, but it's incredibly powerful.

Dapper has been one of my favorite services for years and was joined by Needlebase in the DIY data extraction world that has so much potential.

In recent years, the devil bought Dapper's soul, turning it into a semantic advertising platform in order to monetize its core technology. Then Yahoo bought the whole company this Fall, which will allow the core feed-extraction tool to remain open, at least for a while longer. To use this incredible tool, you've just got to sneak in through the back door at Open.Dapper.net.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It's not dead yet. Maybe more alive than it's been in years, in fact.

Honorable mentions:

Yahoo Pipes - definitely not dead yet. The company released an experimental 2.0 version of this wonderful spaghetti pipes tool for RSS magic this year, but few people noticed and the company itself says its products aren't production ready. YSQL is a better bet, if you're comfortable working with that. If not, well - Pipes isn't dead yet.

Twitter - One of these days! Annotations! Meaningful location as a platform! This year had high hopes for Twitter's technology. The year ended up being about better up-time, a prettier Web site and the company's nascent ad sales efforts.

Ogre translates spatial files into GeoJSON using a command line tool for use in JavaScript Web apps. Awesome. Some people are using this for sure, to set proprietary geodata free. Too few people, though.

OneSpot - This content recommendation engine does a lot of things, but my favorite thing it does is look at any set of feeds you give it and then suggest thousands of other feeds it believes are related. It's easy to curate a few hundred top blogs in any field that way.

That's our list - how does it compare to yours? What's coming down the line that you think might shake things up in RSS and syndication in 2011? Let us know in comments.


]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rss_and_syndication_technologies_of_2010.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rss_and_syndication_technologies_of_2010.php 2010 in Review Tue, 28 Dec 2010 14:42:41 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick It has only been a couple of weeks since its last major update, but today Flipboard, the social magazine for iPad, has released yet another new version of its app into the iTunes App Store. This time around, Flipboard has added support for Google Reader and Flickr, among other improvements, including navigational changes and better content sharing features.
]]> Google Reader Comes to Flipboard (At Last!)

Adding support for Google Reader was one of the top user requests for this popular iPad app, which recently won Apple's editors choice for "iPad App of the Year," Flipboard Co-foudner Evan Doll told us today. And we can safely say that Google Reader users, whether casual or power users, will be happy with the addition.

You can now do nearly everything in Flipboard that you can with Google Reader's own Web app at google.com/reader, except for sharing items with a note, searches or managing subscriptions. While those features may or may not be added in the future (user feedback will determine this), you can, however, star items, share items, see what posts your friends have shared, see a post's likes, and, assuming a post has comments, read and reply to them from within Flipboard. You can also toggle a setting which will mark posts as read as you actually tap on them to read them (the default) or as you flip through pages, scanning headlines and text.

In Flipboard, feeds are shown to you in a magazine-style layout instead of Google Reader's inbox-like interface. In fact, perusing feeds like this may very much remind you of the experience you've enjoyed previously via Feedly, the Web browser extension which also "magazine-ified" Google Reader.

Introducing Live Previews

But the way Flipboard has approached the magazine-like design is quite a bit different than how Feedly does things. Instead of having to tap a link ("read on Web") to view an article from an RSS feed on the originating website, as you did in the past, Flipboard has implemented live previews.

With this new feature, the article's website actually loads below the magazine-style interface and you can drag the website up using your finger to see the site in full. You can then browse that site as you would normally - clicking from post to post, reading or leaving comments, etc. And good news for publishers - this live preview registers as a pageview on backend analytics systems whereas before, on the desktop, those pageviews were lost as RSS subscribers scanned your content, but never clicked through to launch the site itself.

This same type of navigation (using live previews) is presented for any article tweeted or shared on Facebook from one of your friends, assuming the RSS feed is one Flipboard has a record of. And yes, it parses shortened URLs to determine if that's the case. Flipboard's content partners also now have the live previews as well.

 

Flickr Added, Too

In addition, Flipboard has added Flickr to its list of services supported, which looks great on the iPad. Flickr users can browse photos, tap to view individual items, favorite photos, read and leave comments, browse their Flickr groups and pretty much anything else you would do on the Web. (Except, of course, having to click "next," "next," "next" to work through someone's photostream.)

Navigation and Sharing Changes

The overall navigation for all Flipboard sections has been improved in this release. Now, tapping the title of a section lets you navigate through a Table of Contents. Depending on what section you're in, you could use this to quickly change to a different folder of RSS feeds from Google Reader, for example, or an individual RSS feed, a Facebook page you're a fan of, a Facebook group, various friend lists, or even Flipboard's own recommended sections which you may or may not subscribe to.



Also new is a status update button that lets you share an item from anywhere in Flipboard out to social networks like Facebook or Twitter.



Flipboard is available on iTunes here as a free download.

Update: Flipboard has released a new video detailing the new features, which we've embedded below. Pay attention at the 40 second mark. We love you too, Flipboard! ]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/flipboard_adds_google_reader_flickr_and_more.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/flipboard_adds_google_reader_flickr_and_more.php News Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:01:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Google has just announced that it's releasing an official Google Reader app for Android. The app will support all the features you'd expect in a Google Reader app - unread counts, sharing, starring, and liking. But it has many more features that, no big surprise, may make it a better version than what's available on the iPhone.

The Android version will support multiple accounts, preferences for your syncing, as well as the ability to subscribe and search for new feeds via your phone.


]]> It also includes some less obvious features, including the ability to navigate through feeds via your volume key - something that addresses one of the major complaints with other mobile versions of Google Reader, the "fat finger" syndrome.

If you hit the menu key while on an individual item, you'll be able to use the "send" feature which will integrate with other apps on your phone so you can share the feed to your other apps or services, including Facebook and Twitter. And if you hold down a folder or a particular subscription, you'll have the option to rename folders or unsubscribe from feeds, something that makes the app much more usable.

Google says this version will be available today, but at the time of publishing we can't find it in the Android Market.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_gets_an_official_android_app.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_gets_an_official_android_app.php Google Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:06:21 -0800 Audrey Watters Gist.com is a database of dynamic, information-rich user profiles that can be accessed via the Web or inside your email or other communication-management tool, or on your mobile device.

The database is populated with the people who have signed up for Gist's public beta and their contacts. There are 100 million profiles of people and companies behind Gist's wall, collected over about a year. Now, Gist wants users to "claim" their profiles by updating their own data (and potentially making some information public).

]]> Crowdsourcing your social network

You may have encountered sites like Intelius, which built profiles for users by scraping publicly available data they've submitted elsewhere, slotting it into a directory that users have no control over, and saving it forever. Gist doesn't do this exactly, but it gets your name from someone in your social graph, connects it to your social media profiles and slots in your recent blog posts. The "vast majority" of the 100 million people in Gist's directory don't know they have Gist profiles, CEO and founder T.A. McCann said.

Example of a Gist public profile.

But unlike Intelius, your profile is only visible to Gist users, and to some degree, you can take control of it. Gist is encouraging users to "claim" their profiles by registering, picking a URL for your profile and deciding what information to make public. The resulting profile is where Gist most resembles LinkedIn and will be indexable by search engines and visible to anyone with the address, similar to Google Profiles.

Here's the rub: You can control what you make public, but Gist users will still see a slightly different profile for you, which they can update with your private blog, personal Flickr and even excerpts from your recent email conversations. Gist uses this user-submitted information to "crowd source" its database, which helps ensure that information stays up to date.

Google Reader meets your Rolodex

Gist is useful for professionals such as marketers or journalists who have to manage a big network of contacts. But it's more than a database of information about people with links to their social media profiles. Gist also has a space for you to tag a contact, write notes about her, shows your contacts in common from various social sites and display her recent blog posts or Twitter updates.

Example of a profile you would see after you login to your account at Gist.com.

Gist will also assign a level of "importance" for your contacts, editable by you, which it factors into a Facebook-esque "News Feed." It's a consolidated inbox, McCann said. We called it a personal relationship manager.

Gist is a powerful, usable alternative to competitor LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network which has been criticized as stale, hostile to developers and fumbling new features (see our post, "Why Does LinkedIn Keep Doing Things That Don't Make Sense?").

A platform and a plug-in

You can integrate Gist into your existing workflow by installing a plugin for Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, Lotus Notes or the iPhone or Android app. It's also available as a Google Apps gadget and an email digest. McCann said a robust application programming interface, or API, is already in priavate use and will eventually become public, but declined to give details.
How Gist works in Gmail.

Gist is a strong competitor not only to LinkedIn, but also to apps like Rapportive, a browser add-on that displays user profiles in Gmail and expensive databases of people and contact information like Vocus. Gist raised $4 million in July on top of $6.75 million last year. McCann plans to monetize by providing premium services to users who want to see information from paid databases like Hoovers and enterprises that want to integrate Gist into their own software.

So is it a LinkedIn killer?

The crowdsourcing element is a little unnerving. Gist lets anyone submit information about you, and anyone you've emailed can upload the subject lines of your emails and who you've cc'ed (note: Gist does not make content from your emails public). It's all information that you've made public in some way or another, but it's a little scary in the aggregate.

Gist is a formidable LinkedIn challenger, and perhaps it deserves to win. We love the library of plugins and extensive functionality. But Gist's automated and crowd-sourced database is a little too slick - if only because it reminds you that information you share on the Web could end up anywhere.

We'd love to hear what you think about Gist. Have you claimed your profile?

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_competitor_has_100_million_profiles_wants.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_competitor_has_100_million_profiles_wants.php Social Web Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:50:55 -0800 Adrianne Jeffries