ReadWriteWeb first wrote about Google Product Ideas in late 2008. At the time the site was focused on collecting mobile ideas. Today Google is offering users a chance to submit on a variety of products. Within each sub-site users can view the top voted suggestions, the most popular concepts, the newest submissions and the ideas that have been "answered" or acted upon. While Google Reader's Answered Ideas page is currently blank, it will be interesting to track what the team chooses to work on and why.

To submit your product ideas visit the main Product Ideas page.

This move probably makes a lot of sense for NewsGator, as the company can now focus more on working with its enterprise and government customers. Running an online RSS reader is pretty resource intensive. For the most part, NewsGator was only duplicating Google Reader's features anyway, though it did offer a number of features that Google doesn't yet offer in its online RSS reader.

The most important part of the announcement actually comes at the end of the FAQ about the transition. NewsGator argues that its enterprise products have grown at a record pace in the last 18 months. The company also announced that its Social Sites product already has over a million paying users. Under these circumstances, offering a free online news reader probably didn't make any sense for NewsGator anymore.

Free Desktop Readers Will Live On

It's important to note that the company will continue to develop and support its free desktop and mobile readers, though NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile will no longer be available for consumers after August 31. NewsGator's browser toolbar and desktop notifier will also be discontinued.

The Good Stuff Machine

While my6sense is a capable feed reader in its own right, it's what my6sense's founder Barak Hachamov likes to call the company's "good stuff machine" that makes all the difference. While traditional feed readers just organize items chronologically, my6sense actually watches what you do while you read your feeds. The app, for example, looks at messages you read, links you click on, items you share and the position of these items in your stream, as well as items you skip. You can also actively mark a message as interesting by clicking the 'I like' button.

After you have spent only a few sessions with the app, my6sense will have already gotten a good sense of the items that are probably most relevant to you. Of course, the more you use it (we used the web app regularly since the beta launch last December), the better the recommendations get.

In our experience, my6sense's algorithms do a great job at figuring out a user's interests. If you are a real news junkie, you will probably still sometimes want to switch to the regular timeline mode that organizes items chronologically. After all, the items you don't usually think you would be interested in can sometimes really grab your attention (which is, to be honest, a problem that all recommendation systems have to grapple with).

Import and Share

It is worth noting that the app can also import your streams from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Flickr. From within the app, you can also share the most interesting items you find on Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

My6sense can import your feeds from Google Reader, iGoogle, MyYahoo, Newsgator, and NetVibes. Thanks to this, it's quite easy to get started. Sadly, though, the app doesn't sync with any of these services, so items you read on my6sense won't show up as read in your Google Reader subscriptions. My6sense also offers a curated lists of feeds that new users can subscribe to.

A Few Things to Improve

There are a few nagging omissions in the app, though, that keep it from being really great. Most importantly, you can't tell the app to only display items that were posted in the last 24 or 48 hours. In a way, this makes sense - after all, the app is trying to give you the most relevant items, including those that you might have overlooked. But often, we just want to see what the most interesting items posted today are, and as of now, my6sense can't do that.

Another problem with the app is that once you import your social network feeds from Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed, your timeline often gets overwhelmed by these items. At least for us, my6sense performed far better when we disabled these feeds.

Currently, my6sense also doesn't offer an offline mode, so you can't use it to read feeds while on a plane or far from the nearest cell tower.

Overall, we recommend you give my6sense a try. After all, the app is free, and importing your feeds from your current feed reader is easy enough - just give it a day or two to see if the recommendation system works for you.

Thier super secret new product, developed in conjunction with Shellen's Reader co-founder, Chris Wetherell, will be out at the end of June and is based on recently acquired technology from Wetherell. "We're not talking too much about it, but it is a new social media application that works with your existing networks, Twitter and a few others. We don't want to say too much more, but the technology gives us a really interesting interface." Shellen also revealed that another top-level new hire will be coming aboard soon.

Thing Labs was born from Plinky, Inc. "Plinky.com is doing well and will continue on," said Shellen, "but since it's not the only product we are working on, we felt the need to change the company name to reflect the new direction."

"We have a good base of users at Plinky, but we started experimenting more and sped up the cycle for improving that. We thought we should continue, so then we joined efforts with Chris and started a new approach for releasing new products."

It appears as though Shellen and the rest of the Thing Labs crew are keeping this project under tight wraps. We and the rest of the tech world will be watching closely as this new mystery product unfolds in the weeks to come.

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.

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

Unfortunately, Technorati's not what it used to be anymore. While we here at RWW are very proud to have climbed to the #14 spot in the Top 100 most linked-to blogs overall in the Technorati Index (look out Perez Hilton, you're next in line) the fact of the matter is that for everyday use Technorati doesn't feel very reliable anymore.

How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free. Given the need to classify a lot of content with minimal human intervention, this could be a great place for Semantic Web technology to come in.

Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. None are as solid a solution as the blogosphere deserves. This is a huge opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose.

Technorati

Pros:

The Technorati Blog Finder. was set up for just this purpose and in earlier days claiming and tagging your blog on Technorati was considered an essential step in getting started with a blog. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.

Technorati offers a clear standard of authority and you can download the OPML file of the top 10 blogs in any category. Why only 10? I have no idea.

Cons:

After years of spotty service, seemingly random redesigns that made the site even worse than it was before, a crazy idea to get bloggers to point all their rel=tag links to Technorati (!) and the entry of bigger players into blog search - Technorati doesn't feel as active today as it once did. There are probably a lot of top blogs in any niche that haven't added themselves to the directory.

The directory is also organized according to the tags applied to a blog by its own author, typically when the blog just gets started.

The user experience is not good at Technorati but it's good enough to still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.

Del.icio.us

Pros:

We wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us in a post last month. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

There's a huge amount of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There are also RSS feeds, user comments, information about the people (users) who have done the classifying and a lot of other helpful features. I've been using Del.icio.us to find top niche blogs a lot lately and it's served me fairly well, even if I have to eyeball the last few yards to an answer.

Cons:

Del.ico.us hasn't been evolving very quickly, at least the publicly available version of the service. There are a lot of obnoxious qualities to it, like the fact that you can't search for most popular items with multiple tags - there's no such page as http://del.icio.us/popular/topic+blog.

Search results pages are funky and tag/topic+blog just means that a URL has been saved at least once with both of those terms, not that any number of people used both terms at once. It's not intuitive to look up the tags given a URL much less an entire domain. Finally, at least in the tech sector a lot of hip cats are using Ma.gnolia now instead of Del.icio.us. It's a recommendation engine waiting, forever, to happen and I'm still heartbroken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.

StumbleUpon

Pros:

StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, and an algorithm combined with human editorial judgment about the blogs in question.

Cons:

It's more "fun" than it is business, unless you're into SEO. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category. The search results page is really random-looking; good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.

Google Reader Recommendations

Pros:

Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. I'm hoping that starting a dedicated Google Reader account filled only with some known feeds in a niche, I can have other top sources in that same niche recommended to me.

Cons:
Recommendations don't come right away, you have to wait for awhile. There's also a limit to the number of recommendations you can receive at one time. It is a tech-focused community, disproportionately to the blogosphere in general. Finally, this is a pretty silly little hack at things and you find yourself getting tied up with trying to run multiple Google accounts, etc.

AideRSS

Pros:

I love AideRSS because the criteria for hotness is relatively clear and I find the service really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, Diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche-specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS to quickly discover what their communities of readers find most engaging. It's magic, almost.

Cons:

The service only works most of the time and long URLs choke it up. It's also limited to feeds, which take some creative thinking in order to bend to our particular purpose of finding top blogs.

Ask.com Blogsearch

Pros:

Ask has the best blog search on the web. It uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche-specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source.

Cons:
Ask does get overloaded sometimes and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't rely on it alone. Ask Blogsearch does index a lot of funky feeds that clutter search results even if they aren't spam. Try it out and you'll see what I mean.

Conclusion

See what I mean? Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche. There's big room for improvement in this toolset though.

What do you use for this kind of research? I'd love to know.

As part of this year's Top 10 Products series, we offer below the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008. These are the feed tools we and the people we know use day in and day out - we love them, we hate them, we wouldn't want to work without them.

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008

About the Selections

These aren't all new products from 2008. They are the products in the RSS and syndication world that we think made the biggest impact or were the most useful.

To be honest, this was not a particularly good year for innovation in the RSS space. Too many of the products listed below are incumbents, several of which drove us crazy this year. They remain on the list, however, because they are incredibly useful and nothing topped them.

Some honorable mentions are deserved as well. We talked to many people who like RSS magazine-style start page Feedly, though we found it overly constrictive and don't feel that it's made a big market splash yet. We also found the Associated Press's AP Member Marketplace very interesting. Had we gotten a chance to get to know it better, it could very well have been on this list. Finally, we love African social media aggregator Afrigator - it's a great way to learn about what's happening all over the continent and it's a great use of RSS. We named it one of the Top 10 International Products of 2008 but we think it deserves an honorable mention in this category as well.

And Now the RWW Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

Postrank

Formerly known as AideRSS, Postrank is simply the most useful RSS related application we've seen in a long time. Plug in any RSS feed and Postrank will rate each item in the feed on a scale of 1 to 10, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, etc. You can then subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most popular items in that feed.

We use Postrank all the time, in all kinds of contexts: from monitoring break-out stories in niche markets we don't follow closely, to finding out about the bread and butter of new blogs we discover to running search feeds through Postrank to surface hot conversations on any topic.

Postrank has been around for about a year and a half, but we write about it over and over again.

This year Postrank opened an API, made a bunch of deals with other companies, improved its service, raised a round of funding and just generally rocked.

FriendFeed

Social "life streaming" service FriendFeed is making syndication a more social activity than anything else has yet. The service aggregates your activity data from all around the web, lets your friends comment on it and shows you the activities of all your friends' friends when someone you know comments on something and exposes it to their network.

If RSS readers will change your life and work through their awesome usefulness, FriendFeed is a service that makes syndication fun. It's one of the first places we go on the web every morning.

We interviewed the ex-Googlers who founded FriendFeed last February and that interview is still the best place to learn how the service works under the hood.

If you'd like to connect with the ReadWriteWeb crew on FriendFeed (and we hope you will) we've posted a tour of our FriendFeed profile pages here. Please join us also in the ReadWriteWeb FriendFeed Room.

Gnip

Gnip is a social media ping server, a service that other services ask for user data updates from all around the web. There's nothing here for users, but almost every developer we talk to these days who is aggregating content in order to add value to it (and that is the name of the game) has Gnip on its radar. The company aims to make aggregation more timely, scalable and efficient than it is today.

We wrote about Gnip at length when the service launched in July.

Snackr

Snackr is a simple little RSS ticker built in Adobe AIR. Its frenetic and unstopping delivery of news is too much for many people, but the rest of us love it. It's where our eyes wander during page loads and other down times. Many of the stories you read here at ReadWriteWeb were based on things we first caught wind of through Snackr.

Snackr was built in-house at Adobe by Flex team member Narciso Jaramillo. We reviewed it in May and have been using it ever since.

Google Reader

Google Reader is the market leader in full featured RSS readers, having pulled ahead of the troubled Bloglines in recent months. This year Google Reader has made their sharing feature much more transparent, added the ability to translate any feed into a number of different languages and recently redesigned.

It hasn't been a super exciting year for the product, and there are still basic problems like very infrequent caching of rare feeds, but Google Reader's incredible dominance in the field makes it a required part of this list.

Google Reader RSS Subscriber Count Greasemonkey Script

One of the simplest little changes we've made to our browsers lately is the addition of this greasemonkey script that shows the number of readers in Google Reader that any page's RSS feed has. You can usually multiply that number by 2 to 4 times for an estimate of how many total readers a feed has across all readers, but either way it's a great little indication of a site's popularity.

The script was written by an anonymous user named "uncv" and we'd like to thank them. We love what they've done! This was one of the 7 coolest browser tweaks from the last month that we wrote about earlier this week. It's already won a permanent place in our hearts!

Dapper

Dapper.net is a point and click interface for data extraction - a nice way to say scraping an RSS feed. We continue to depend on Dapper for all kinds of research, we're always finding new ways to use it around here. We love it.

Unfortunately, some sites don't like us to have access to links back to them available in our RSS readers (like Facebook, for example) and that really upsets us. In many cases those feeds that we created ourselves are the only way we'd be drawn back to a site, so it's their loss as much as ours.

Dapper has been around since 2006, but they recently launched a semantic ad platform that we included in our list of the top 10 semantic web products of 2008.

Twitterfeed

Love it or hate it, Twitterfeed has made a big impact on the web in 2008. It's the service people use to publish an RSS feed right into Twitter.

Some people argue that twitter is all about conversation and that publishing an RSS feed there is grating and inappropriate. We like getting our local newspaper story links on Twitter, though, and everything from disaster monitoring to traffic conditions are now available via Twitterfeed.

Feedburner

Google's RSS publishing service Feedburner hurt our ability to break news first, can't be used in many corporate environments because it gets blocked in China and only made 6 posts all year to its company blog, none since May. That's compared to 28 posts in 2007. Apparently once you get your Google money there's not much point in communicating with the people who depend on you every day.

Why would we call Feedburner one of the top 10 RSS products on the year then? Because despite how frustrating it can be, the service is still so incredibly useful that we don't know what we'd do without it. Not just for publishing and analytics for ReadWriteWeb feeds - from numbers to email delivery to FeedFlare links, Feedburner will work magic easily on any feed you work with. I've got 68 different feeds in my account and I'll probably publish several more before the year is up.

Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is another RSS based service that is really frustrating, hasn't innovated substantially in the last year - but is still so powerfully useful that it deserves a spot as one of the top products in this market.

Splicing and filtering RSS feeds is the simplest thing to do with Pipes, but there's much more you can do with it as well. It's great for us pseudo-geeks, we can work all kinds of magic with it. We've used Pipes throughout the year to do things that we (ok I) don't have the technical chops to do otherwise. For that I thank the Pipes team a whole lot.

Those Were Our Favorites This Year - How About You?

Did we miss anyone you think should have been on this list? We hope you'll share your favorites in comments below. What RSS and syndication products impacted you the most in 2008?

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rsssyndication_products_of_2008.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rsssyndication_products_of_2008.php 2008 in Review Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:30:30 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick When BlogRize, a blog community and aggregator, first launched earlier this year, we gave it a very positive review. BlogRize is an interesting mix between Digg, Techmeme, and ReadBurner, though with a stronger emphasis on individual communities around blogs (like the RWW community here) and recommendations.

During the last few months, BlogRize's founder Jesse Spaulding has been working on a major redesign of the site, which he is rolling out today. The new design features an enhanced voting system, updated ranking algorithms, and a lot of updates to the user interface that make using the site a lot easier and more fun.

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BlogRize creates a community of readers around specific blogs and then generates an individualized Digg-like site for each community, where the ranking of the stories depends on the recommendations and votes of other group members (among other things). While you can submit stories to BlogRize directly, the main conduit through which users add stories to the system is through recommendations in Google Reader.

User Interface

A lot of the user interface updates to BlogRize are quite useful. You can now, for example, toggle story previews and see in-line comments from your friends right on your BlogRize homepage. This new version also allows you to quickly mark a story as read by simply clicking on the white space around the story.

On nice addition to BlogRize's feature set is its ability to find your profiles and activity on other sites through Google's Social Graph API. This makes importing your profiles a lot easier.

Most importantly, however, Spaulding has streamlined the voting system, which was one of our few complaints about the earlier version. Unlike Digg or Reddit, where you can only vote a story up or down, BlogRize allows you to mark a story as 'interesting,' 'funny,' 'disagree,' 'seen this already,' or 'inaccurate.' BlogRize also looks at links to stories from other blogs and takes these into account when it ranks its stories as well.

Join the RWW BlogRize Community

Jesse told us that his focus while developing and redesigning the service was on giving bloggers an opportunity to create and promote their own blog communities, and after this redesign, BlogRize has become an every better place for blog readers to get together in a relatively small but focused group. Thanks to this focus and the self-selection of the group members, the recommendations are always spot-on.

If you want to join the community of RWW readers on BlogRize, just click here and sign up for the service.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blogrize_relaunches.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blogrize_relaunches.php Products Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:05:36 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Popular Firefox addon Read It Later has just introduced an updated version of their plugin which adds new functionality to Google Reader. With the new extension, which now works in both Firefox and IE, you can now get through your RSS feeds faster by checking off the items you want to read later in more detail. You can then access those saved items from any web browser, whether it's Firefox at home, IE at work, or even your iPhone.

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]]> The updated Read It Later extension adds a Greasemonkey-esque feature to your Google Reader feed list that places a check mark next to your feed items to the right of the star. As you go through your feeds, the posts you check will be automatically added to your reading list - the saved list of items you can access at anytime at readitlaterlist.com. With the extension's included offline functionality, you can also queue up a number of articles to read when you know you're going to be away from the net - like when you're on a plane trip, for example.

When managing your reading list through the bookmarklet, you now have more options as well. You can view your list as either "normal" or "condensed," select how many items to show per page, open the list in the sidebar, and enable or disable various context menus and additional toolbar buttons.

However, the best feature to come to your reading list is the ability to sort it by PostRank. This functionality, formerly called AideRSS, is something we've been big fans of here at RWW for some time. With PostRank enabled, your reading list is intelligently filtered by popularity. Posts are scored in several ways, including number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, number of diggs, and how many inbound links it has received. So now, you can read your list in order of importance, an especially useful feature for those suffering from information overload.

Other improvements like updated privacy controls and tweaks to existing features round out this latest release, making Read It Later a great addition to your browser whether that's Firefox or IE. Now all we need is an iPhone bookmarklet and we'll be all set.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/read_it_later_comes_to_google_reader.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/read_it_later_comes_to_google_reader.php Products Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:55:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Popular RSS reader Bloglines says it's solved the much publicized recent problems with feed updating that lead smaller services to pursue its users and Google Reader triumphalists to declare the RSS reader market all zipped up. It's true that Bloglines has a lot of problems, but all software does and competition is incredibly important in any sector, including among RSS readers.

Despite its shortcomings, Bloglines is worth a look and when it works it works very well for many people. RSS is such a powerful media that it's essential that the market leader, Google, be kept on their toes.

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What Happened?

In a lunchtime announcement today, Bloglines' Eric Engleman (usually a very charming fellow) offered an update that's unlikely to satisfy at least the most discerning Bloglines users.

Some folks might have noticed that specific feeds were not updating recently on Bloglines, and we wanted to update you and fill you in on what's been going on. We have figured out what the glitch has been. Over the weekend, a fix was released on Bloglines to resolve the issue. All feeds should now be updating and back to normal.

That doesn't sound like filling in anyone about what's been going on, that sounds like an assurance that unnamed problems are solved. That's fine, it was probably a pretty simple error that lead to feeds not being checked for updates.

Update: More details from Engleman...

More technical details is that there was a bug related to the RSS crawling infrastructure relating to feeds that "errored" out. In other words, specific feeds would "error" out then not get recrawled. Prior to this last weekend, feeds were being fixed on a case by case basis. As of this weekend, all feeds should be updating correctly.

Blogines Is Popular For a Reason

On a good day, Bloglines has a lot going for it. It supports OpenID login, which is great. The year-old Beta version is much more attractive than the washed out colors of Google Reader. Bloglines Mobile is a much better mobile reader than Google Reader Mobile, though we haven't tested out the iPhone versions. It's nice that Bloglines shows you how many subscribers a feed has whenever you look at it, and thank goodness for those subscriber counts being put to use for spam control in parent company Ask.com's blog search, one of the best blog search engines on the web.

Bloglines lets you organize your own startpage view by dragging and dropping feeds you're subscribed to. That's pretty cool. We wrote about the new version of Bloglines a year ago this summer and we really liked it a lot.

Unfortunately, we can't figure out how to get a "river of news" view inside the new Bloglines, meaning: show me the most recent individual post from all the feeds in a folder, in the order the item arrived in, don't show me every unread item in one feed before you show me another. That's a deal-killer for this author, though otherwise I'd love to use the Bloglines Beta instead of Google Reader.

Google Reader Should Not Have Monopoly Control Over RSS Readers!

Google Reader, despite its market dominance, superior feature set and burning love from user/advocates, should not be the end of RSS reader development. Google's control over huge stores of information, including your reading history, isn't an unconditional good. Perhaps more important to users though, is the fact that Google Apps tend to be crude substitutes for real software and they are almost never updated. Google Reader may be one of the least crude, but it took years before the company added search of all things to Google Reader.

Google made huge waves earlier this month when they said that some time soon they will add RSS to web search queries, making them the last major search engine to do so. This weekend Google made changes to its iGoogle RSS startpage that enraged millions of users.

Do you really want Google to nail down complete dominance over the world of RSS? We sure don't. We want to see a multitude of viable companies offering competing feature sets, being responsive to their users' needs and innovating. In other words, Long Live Bloglines!

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bloglines_is_back.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bloglines_is_back.php NYT Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:12:21 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick If you're a Google Reader user, no doubt you've taken a look at your Google Reader trends. The trends feature of Reader is an invaluable service that shows you which feeds you read, share, star, and email. It also provides stats on your subscriptions themselves, showing which ones are frequently updated, inactive, or the most obscure. Bar charts show items read by day, time of day, and time of week, and a tag cloud lets you find items by keyword. With all this data within easy reach, Google Reader Trends provides insight into your feed reading habits which you can then use help you to improve your feeding reading activities as well as the way you categorize your feeds and more.

But Google Reader isn't the only web app that could use a feature like this. If we could pick any other Google service to provide an analysis of our habits, it would certainly be Gmail. But could it be that Trends for Gmail is already underway?

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]]> Mail Trends

A recent post by Ed Kohler pointed us to a project under development for this very purpose. The project, called simply "Mail Trends," was mentioned on Mihai Parparita's personal blog back in March. (Parparita is a Google employee who had helped to build Google Reader itself.) Since Gmail doesn't have an official API, Mail Trends instead uses Gmail's IMAP support to pull the message headers and analyze them in order to extrapolate the data. Mail Trends can generate tables, graphs and distributions based on time of day, senders, recipients, mailing lists, etc. You can see an example of what it can output here where Parparita ran it on a piece of the Enron Email Dataset.

The project, currently hosted at Google Code, offers the code available for download, but, unfortunately to run it over your own email, you have to do geeky programmer things like downloading something called Cheetah and mess around with a command prompt. There is not an executable file for either Mac or PC. (Lifehacker has a step-by-step guide to installation if you want to go this route, though).

We Need Mail Trends!

Outlook users already have an add-in called Xobni (our coverage) which provides a look at email trends among other things, so why not Gmail?

Although Mail Trends is clearly a personal project, we wonder if there's any chance of seeing it show up one day in Gmail's Labs section. Labs, the area under Gmail's Settings that introduces experimental features seems the ideal place to debut the trends technology...at least until it's perfected.

We contacted Parparita to see if there was any chance of that ever happening, but he never responded.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/will_gmail_get_google_reader-like_trends.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/will_gmail_get_google_reader-like_trends.php Products Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:30:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Google today announced that it has signed up the Obama and McCain campaigns to share blog posts and news items they read on Google Reader. This program, called Power Readers in Politics also includes items shared by a number of high-profile journalists. While neither Google nor the campaigns pretend that the candidates themselves do any of the sharing (McCain doesn't know how to use a computer, after all), this is an interesting experiment and might just introduce feed reading to a few more people.

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]]> Some of the journalists involved in this effort include John Dickerson from Slate (who is also a pretty active Twitter user), Mike Allen from Politico, Chuck DeFeo from Townhall, Arianna Huffington, and Ruth Marcus from the Washington Post. These journalists, by the way, have also shared a lot more items so far than any of the campaigns.

There are no major surprises in the reading lists of the two campaigns and it also needs to be noted that these are relatively small lists. John McCain's list is comprised of 26 feeds, while the Obama campaign only tracks 18 sources, including its own blog (and yes, somewhat predictably, McCain tracks Fox News and Obama the New York Times...). Overall, though, these reading lists are very conservative and mostly include the major, well known news organizations and large political blogs.

The setup of Power Readers in Politics is quite well done overall. Google completely avoids using any technical terms like RSS and OPML that might scare away users unfamiliar with feed reading. Instead, Google just offers users to subscribe to these reading lists in Google Reader. If this gets any traction, it might become a good way for Google to introduce more people to feed reading - but for that to happen, the campaigns will have to start sharing a bit more and may have to get a bit more adventurous in what items they share.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_and_mccain_google_reader.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_and_mccain_google_reader.php News Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:06:59 -0800 Frederic Lardinois The Google Reader team just announced that it has implemented more granular controls for who you share items with, including the ability to manage a list of friends within Google Reader that is kept separate from your Google Talk contacts. When Google first announced that Shared Items would now automatically appear in the Google Reader of all your Google Chat contacts, a lot of people were quite upset about the lack of control over who they were sharing with and the possible privacy implications of this.

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]]> According to the announcment on the Google Reader blog, Google was aware of these privacy concerns and, in their defense, when the issue around Shared Items and privacy first appeared last December (and, according to some people, ruined their Christmas), they quickly explained what they were doing and how to better manage the shared posts. In today's post, Google calls the original sharing features it implemented in December "experimental," though users of course had not option but to participate in this experiment.

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.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_now_lets_you_sha.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_now_lets_you_sha.php News Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:34:45 -0800 Frederic Lardinois At the beginning of this month, we told you about Feedly, a Firefox extension for Google Reader users that provides an alternative UI for reading through the news. The Feedly UI lays out your feeds magazine-style while also including a number of other features such as Twitter and FriendFeed integration as well as integration with Google Search. However, despite the richness of what Feedly has to offer, heavy RSS users said they could not really use the application because it did not allow them to quickly scan their feeds like they could in Google Reader.

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]]> Feedly's developer, Edwin Khodabakchian, admits that heavy RSS readers aren't really the core audience for Feedly, but he decided to create a "river of news" view for them (ahem, us) anyway. This new view is available by clicking the river icon on the top-left of Feedly's navigation bar. The resulting view looks like this:

Feedly's River of News

This new river view offers the following features:

• Longer lists of 200+ articles, loaded on demand as you scroll.
• Ability to set various type of filters: unread, category, subscription.
• Keyboard shortcuts - the same as Google Reader
• Ability to click on the summary of an article and expand it inline.
• Ability to play video and listen to podcasts directly from the list.
• Google Reader-like ability to automatically mark articles as read while scrolling
• Summize-like notifications when new articles are published.

Now even sophisticated RSS users can have the best of both worlds - quick access to all of Feedly's features while also being able to scan the news almost as fast as in Google Reader itself.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedly_launches_a_river_of_news.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedly_launches_a_river_of_news.php Products Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez