Greasemonkey, previously only a Firefox add-on, lets you customize the way a website is displayed using small bits of Javascript, and we're excited to see it added to one of the faster, tidier browsers available.

Greasemonkey scripts perform a variety of nifty little functions, from autofilling Twitter usernames to hiding links on Digg that you've already dugg.

While users were able to manually install Greasemonkey scripts before Chrome 4, this latest version provides native support and one-click installation. We gave it a quick test run and everything was just as advertised. Pick a Greasemonkey script, read up on it, and if you decide you like it and trust it, click install. Voila!

We'd been expecting this development since December, when we noticed that Boodman had been hired onto the Chrome Extensions team. It looks like the day has finally come. If you'll excuse us, we have a couple thousand new browser tweaks we need to go check out.

Called simply Facebook Keyboard Navigation, the tool requires the Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey - a powerful browser customization tool you can learn to make even more advanced use of in 5 minutes.

There are 15 keystroke shortcuts out of the box, but by going through your Firefox menus Toolkits, Greasemonkey, manage scripts then select that script and hit edit - then you can make some additional customization. It's a remarkably simple script, just look at the format in the file and either change or add to it in the same way.

I assigned the letter "R" to jump to my Facebook list of "real friends" by grabbing the part of that list's URL that follows facebook.com, pasting it into the edited script and saving. I then had to reload Facebook but sure enough, it works great.

Once you've done that, try the Facebook Fixer script. These are all remarkably easy to use and they make life so much better!

The first is much like our favorite Google script, which adds Twitter search results to the top of Google search results pages. Pennsylvania software developer, Billy DiStefano, published Twitter Search Results on Bing 30 minutes ago. Mattie Casper, a Principal Design Engineer at Citrix Systems, published a script called Bing Cleaner earlier this morning. Here's what Bing looks like with these scripts running, and short instructions on installing them.

In the image above, Twitter search results are slapped onto the top of the results column and the related resources column is moved from the left of the page to the right. That's a nice change as it makes search results the first thing the eye sees when starting on the left.

If you haven't used any Greasemonkey scripts before, see the instructions and video in our post How to Use Greasemonkey in Less Than 5 Minutes. It's just a browser plug-in and it's really easy to use.

Once you have Greasemonkey installed, just visit the two script links above, click to install, and you are ready to rock and roll. I just added Bing to my Drag and Drop Zones search interface as well, so I'll be able to give it a better test run.

We look forward to seeing what else the Greasemonkey community comes up with for Bing, but we suspect that these first two scripts will be the most useful.

All that is going to end, at least for the next little while, as we have just found the GM script that does everything (and we mean everything). It's the innocently named, Troy's Twitter Script (created by Troy Thompson) that we first noticed written up over on TechRaga.

After installing the script and visiting Twitter, we found so many useful tweaks to almost every Twitter view that it was almost overwhelming. Here's what it does broken down into three main functionalities:

• Enhancement: Links in tweets are automatically expanded and replaced with the target page title if available. Media like YouTube videos and Twitpic images are included in-line. Hashtags are converted to Twitter search links. Auto-pagination is enabled as you get to the bottom of the current page. The 'definitions' area is hidden. Last but not least, replies are included underneath the latest tweet, indented and smaller (great for those of you still using the default "include all @replies" in your settings!)
• Functionality: Hovering over a tweet shows default actions like star (save), reply, and retweet. Long URLs are automatically shortened if the tweet you are typing in exceeds the length limit. Twitter names get autocomplete launched by typing an @ in a tweet. Twitter bio text gets inserted into following/followers list.
• New Hotness: A new search field added to Twitter sidebar. Any searches performed from sidebar get saved and added to the sidebar (removable). A tiny smilie face is added to the Twitter icon of those people who are following you. When viewing a specific Twitter user, their social graph is inserted in the bio area. Notes can be added to any user's Twitter page. Local time is added if the user's time zone is in their profile. Map to user's location is inserted if location or geo coordinates are in their profile. Finally, the most awesome addition: Groups support in your followers/following tabs, you can add people to groups that show up in the Twitter sidebar.

Troy's Twitter script, in our opinion, is crazy awesome. If you find yourself in a memory crunch and prefer not to use a standalone Twitter application, and use Firefox, this script is a must-have. In fact, it's too bad that Greasemonkey scripts really only work well in Firefox, because it sure would be great to have all these features in every browser out there. To that end, you can try using Greasemetal (covered here) for Chrome, or GreaseKit for Safari on Mac OSX.

Update: There's a modified version of Troy's script that adds a link in the user profile to the Mailana user analysis app, Top Twitter Friends. This feature should be rolled into the main script in the next version.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.

Greasemonkey is easy to use, fast and powerful. Most scripts are hosted and discussed at Userscripts.org, but that site can be a little overwhelming. In the past week, 375 scripts were added or updated. We looked through them all and picked out the best 5. Below we've also posted a screencast that will get you started harmlessly hacking your browser with Greasemonkey in under 5 minutes.

RSS readers can click here to view the video below.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Here's a Flash version, if you prefer it.)

Now What?

There are a lot of must-use Greasemonkey scripts that have been published before this week. Some of our favorites include:

Autopagerize - continuous scrolling from page to page on many websites.

Twitter Search on Google Results Pages - add real-time search to Google.

Memeorandum Colors - color code links on political blog aggregator Memeorandum by the politics of each blog's linking history.

Those are oldies-but-goodies but more and more scripts are available every day. Here are our favorite 5, in no particular order, out of the 375 that were added to or updated on Userscripts.org last week.

1. Gmail 3.0 Productivity Package - adds links to create new Google Docs and integrates other Google services into the GMail interface.

2. Alltop Topic Search and OPML

Guy Kawasaki's Alltop has aggregated the top sources on a long list of topics. This script makes it even more useful by allowing you to search inside each category's archives and export the RSS feeds for all the selected sources into another RSS reader.

3. Google Search Sidebar with Youtube , Wikipedia, Dictionary.com and Flickr Results

In the image above you can see the Twitter Google script results at the top of the page (described above) and this Wikipedia, etc. script on the right hand sidebar. The script works well.

4. Cookie Life Extender

Sick of having to log back in to sites all the time? This script rewrites the expiration date on all cookies in your browser, making them live for 50 years!

5. Vidzbigger

This script makes a bunch of changes to YouTube video pages. It displays the largest video player available, moves the comments into the right sidebar so you can view them while watching the video and it inserts links to download a copy of all videos. It isn't the prettiest thing in the world and has the audacity to insert an ad overlay after videos are completed. It may not be pretty, but it's useful.

Those Are Our Favorites, What About You?

We'd love to hear about your favorite Greasemonkey scripts, too. There are so many of them out there that it's hard to unearth the best. There's nothing quite like it though, when you find a way to change the very browser you look at the web through.

That's exactly what we saw, though, when we got a sneak peak today at Omidyar's new product Ginx. We wrote about Ginx when PE Hub first caught wind of its funding last month. We hoped it would incorporate all kinds of data-intensive recommendation mystery awesomeness. It might later, but so far it's quite simple and we describe below how you can reproduce most of its functionality without changing your essential workflow and using a new tool.

The company insisted to us today that it is not a Twitter client, but it's pretty apparent that its first product is just that. It's a web based interface for Twitter that does a couple of things that are pretty cool, but it doesn't take a whole new company to get these things.

• Ginx prioritizes link sharing through Twitter by extending shortened URLs to their full length, placing a thumbnail from the destination page in your flow of tweets and opening links through a frame that displays the original message and a box to reply above the article being linked to.


• In addition to a tab for replies, Ginx also offers tabs for messages with links in them and messages with links you've clicked on already - so you can go back and find them.


• When viewing a user's profile page, you have the option to view a stream of their friends' messages.


• Click on a #hashtag and you can see a page with just messages containing that tag.

Neat, huh? If this paradigm can be extended out into all kinds of social media sharing, which Ginx's parent company Peer News certainly intends to do though it won't offer any details yet, then that doesn't sound so bad. It will really depend on how good the interface is, because we're not seeing anything wildly innovative here in terms of functionality.

Ginx is in private beta so you can't test it out yet, but if this is the kind of Twitter experience you're looking for, here's what you can do.

First, take 5 minutes to install Greasemonkey - it'll change the way you experience the web.

Then, install this Greasemonkey script and you'll see nested conversations on all Twitter pages.

Next, add this Greasemonkey script and you'll see public replies to any user in the right hand sidebar of their profile page. That's more meaningful than just the messages of everyone they follow - those are the people who they have conversation with.

Now install this script and you'll get shortened URLs extended automatically. Install this one and you'll be able to see relative popularity of the various links via some shortened services.

That's going to take you ten minutes to do. Thanks to the people who put in the time and had the creativity to write those Greasemonkey scripts.

The other features of Ginx just don't seem so revolutionary. There are bookmarking and search services that make it easy enough to recall links. There's a lot of innovation possible in the microblogging and sharing space - but for early adopters at least, there's not much to get excited about yet in Ginx. Maybe they'll come up with something, but our hopes are no longer raised.

Update: We hate to post about Twitter twice in one night, but check out this preview of the new Tweetdeck - a 3rd party Twitter innovator showing how it's done.

It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4-minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.

We hope readers will add comments with some of your favorite Greasemonkey scripts for people to check out as well.

What Is Greasemonkey?

Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to insert Javascript into the local display of web pages in your browser. Nothing changes for anyone else, but images, links or text can be added or hidden automatically when you visit a web page that a script has been written for. Developers have written these little scripts to customize or improve the way different websites are experienced. It's a powerful, lightweight platform that we think you'll really enjoy using.

For non-technical users, "script" may be an intimidating word, but we think of it as a plug-in for the plug-in. The user experience is that simple.

How Do I Use It?

Below, you'll find a 4-minute screencast walking you through the process of setting up Greasemonkey and running some of our favorite scripts. Links and text are below the video. RSS readers can click here to view the video.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)

Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.

Find scripts to install. Most are at Userscripts.org but the ones we reference in the video above are:
AutoPagerize
Better GMail 2
FriendFeed User Profiles
FriendFeed Better Recommended
Greased Lightbox

There's a whole room in FriendFeed dedicated to sharing and discussing new Greasemonkey scripts.

We wrote about Greasemonkey Scripts for the Social Media Addict in May, but the options available grow fast and furious.

Questions? Suggestions?

If there's anything unclear about this, let us know and we or our readers will respond to questions. Likewise, if there are Greasemonkey scripts you think readers here should be sure to see - let us know what they are.

One of these evolutions started quietly in 2008. We are witnessing the rise of a new kind of web: contextual. You might not have heard or thought about it much yet, but you are already using it today. Search remains the killer app on the web, but context is quickly become a viable contender. Why? Because context is what happens instead of search.

Until recently on the web, most sites have not been software - only data, a bunch of flat HTML pages. The software that you used to look at them was, of course, the web browser. The problem was that the browser had no idea what the pages contained, and it did not know what you were doing. Because the browser could not infer your context, it could not help you explore related and relevant information.

The contextual web experience is fundamentally different because there is an understanding of what the user is doing. The combination of the information on the page and the user's behavior creates the context. Once you understand the user's context, you can be more helpful. So, contextual technologies have the potential to bite into the pie that today belongs to search, because it is able to bypass search.

Consider the difference between looking at the IBM home page and a movie page on Netflix. The context is very different, and so likely is the user's intention. The user may be looking at IBM because she is looking for a job or researching IBM products. When the user is looking up a movie, it is because she is thinking about renting it.

The Key Properties of The Contextual Web

The Contextual web will happen when browsers and websites evolve to recognize what users are trying to do. It is the web with less choice and more meaning, where instead of Googling all the time, we Google once and then the rest of the information is available to us automatically, based on our current context.

Here are the key properties of the contextual web experience:

• Relevancy: understanding the user's context better drives content relevancy.
• Shortcuts: contextual shortcuts reduce the need for raw search.
• Personalization: context is based on user intentions and history.
• Remixing: relevant information from around the web is instantly available.

What are some specific examples of contextual technologies that are improving our web experience right now?

Markup Technologies

One of the keys to inferring user context is understanding the underlying information that the user is looking at. This is why the contextual web is related to -- and, to be more precise, is powered by -- semantic web. We have written a lot here on ReadWriteWeb about semantic technologies. Notably, we discussed the difference between the top-down and bottom-up approaches to semantic web, both of which are important for understanding the contextual web.

The bottom-up approach to context is about annotating pages. For example, all modern browsers can detect if the page you are looking at contains an RSS feed. This happens because the browser looks for a tag in the head of the page, which declares type . The fact that the page offers an RSS feed creates an obvious context: subscription. So, the browser then invites you to subscribe using your favorite RSS reader.

Another form of markup that has been discussed recently is microformats, which offer an XHTML-compliant way of embedding metadata about people, places, events, and reviews in existing web pages. Even though microformats are not ubiquitous today, there are clear benefits to using them. The image below is from an excellent post by Mozilla UI lead Alex Faaborg about leveraging microformats in the browser.

Building on the hAtom microformat are Web Slices, introduced by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 8. Web Slices enable publishers to notify users when the information in their web pages changes. For example, Weather.com can create a Web Slice that tells the user when a local weather update is available. eBay can deliver a Web Slice that notifies the user when the price of an auction changes. Similar in concept to RSS, Web Slices focus on updates in part of the web page, enabling publishers and users to communicate directly via the browser.

There are other markup formats that help provide context. For example, popular add-on Cooliris offers a markup format for signaling that a site contains images. By placing a bit of XML code in their home directory, site owners enable users to experience their images using the stunning 3D visualization developed by Cooliris. Another markup format, developed by AdaptiveBlue [disclosure: this is the company I founded], is called ABMeta. This format allows publishers to annotate pages that contain information about books, music, movies, wine, restaurants, stocks, and other everyday things.

All of these markup-based approaches face the same issue: publishers have to do the work of actually annotating the pages. And while the semantic web community has been very vocal about the benefits of annotation, the majority of the web is still flat HTML.

Page 2: Widgets

Widgets

In the meantime, we are seeing a surge in applications that deploy a top-down approach to inferring user context and being helpful. Instead of relying on markup in pages, these applications use heuristics and APIs to recognize the information that the user is interacting with. Based on their recognition, these smart tools then offer contextual shortcuts to the relevant bits of information. Speaking broadly, today there are two primary categories of top-down contextual applications: blog plugins and browser add-ons.

Blog plugins offering a contextual experience have been around for some time, starting with preview technologies. One of the first recent unsuccessful attempts at a preview technology was delivered by Browster. Despite its failure, its successors, CoolPreviews, SnapShots, and Apture, have done much better. While CoolPreviews literally focuses on a preview of the page, SnapShots and Apture deliver a compact summary of the information behind the link. The basic premise behind the previews is sound: if the user is not interested in what is behind the link, the preview can save the user an unnecessary click. Because the user context (in this case, the link) is known, relevant information can be brought to the surface and delivered to the user instantly.

Closely related to previews are widgets that offer contextual shortcuts. Like previews, these widgets work by being anchored to links. Examples of this technology include Yahoo! Shortcuts and SmartLinks from my company AdaptiveBlue. Instead of providing a preview of the underlying content, these technologies offer links to related content around the web. The example below shows a SmartLink on a New York Times movie page, which invites the user, for example, to buy the movie on Amazon or rent it on Netflix.

Our last example of contextual widget technology comes from Colorado-based Lijit. Lijit has developed a search technology that focuses on the individual. You claim your presence around the web, on blogs, Twitter, Flickr, etc., and then others can search your pages on specific topics. Say you are on someone's blog and want to do a search on that person; it makes the most sense to search through this person's pages first; after all, you are in this person's context.

Remarkably, Lijit offers another contextual nugget, called Re-search. It is simple, but a great example of the power of context. If you search for a term on Google and end up on a blog that has a Lijit widget, a header appears with additional results and a prompt to search for more. Lijit automatically infers your context, does a search, and offers additional helpful shortcuts.

Page 3: Browser Add-Ons and Conclusion

Browser Add-Ons

Widgets and markup technologies are making inroads into the contextual web, but an even bigger inroad is being made by browser add-ons. Since Firefox introduced its platform for delivering additional features to the browser, many thousands of browser extensions have been developed. A lot of these extension focus on enhancing the browsing experience by leveraging context. Probably the granddaddy of them all is Greasemonkey, an extension that allows users to install bits of JavaScript that alter the look and content of web pages they visit. We wrote an introduction to this popular add-on and recently followed up with a post on 7 New Greasemonkey Tweaks.

While Greasemonkey scripts are mainly regarded as experimental tools for power users, quite a few other extensions are aimed at building a business around contextual enhancements to the browser. One example is a company called WebMynd, which focuses on enhancing Google search results. WebMynd's extension automatically pushes down Google ads (clever!) to insert its contexual gadget. It allows users to simultaneously search posts on Twitter, book matches on Amazon, video matches on YouTube, and many other sources. An example of what shows up when searching for "semantic web" using the gadget is shown below.

We have mentioned Cooliris several times already. The most popular Cooliris product is the browser add-on that shows stunning 3D views of photos and videos around the web. Cooliris works contextually by automatically recognizing popular photo sites like Flickr, Google Images and Photobucket. Another contextual add-on that works by recognizing content on pages is Glue. This add-on shows you friends and other users who have visited the same book, music, movie, restaurant, wine, and other pages around the web. The context here crosses the content you are viewing with your social graph. Unlike lifestreaming applications that deliver you information about your friends out of context, Glue only brings to the surface information that is relevant to your current context.

A very different example of a contextual web add-on comes from Slovenia-based Zemanta. Its add-on makes it easy for publishers to add contextually relevant links, photos, and video to their posts. Zemanta works by applying its semantic engine to the body of the post and automatically recommending related content. Using Zemanta, bloggers are able to instantly add relevant content to their blog posts, in turn creating a relevant web experience for their users.

Our last two examples of contextual add-ons are Zentact and App Discover, both recently launched. Zentact -- developed by the folks who brought us another contextual phenomenon, MyBlogLog -- aims to solve a problem of staying in touch with people who matter to you. First, you import and tag your email contacts with different tags that reflect their interests. Then, as you browse, Zentact pops up a reminder to contact a person if it deems the page relevant based on the tags. It is a simple yet powerful example of the contextual web.

App Discover works by recommending related applications to the sites that you are visiting. Today, it requires publishers to add markup to their sites, but one can easily imagine how this technology could work top-down. The example below shows App Discover recommending TweetDeck when the user navigates to Twitter.

Browsers

Without a doubt, web browsers are in the best position to deliver the user's contextual web experience. While add-ons are taken in a variety of directions, the two dominant browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, have already incorporated the basic contextual experience: shortcuts. Internet Explorer 8 features technology called Accelerators.

According to Microsoft, Accelerators give you ready access to the online services you use everyday, from any page you visit. Accelerators are defined as little chunks of XML based on pre-defined variables and defined by the browser. Some examples of variables available to Accelerator are the active URL, the active domain, and selected text. The most common action that Accelerators do is perform contextual search based on the user's selection. Another common Accelerator function is the in-place lookup, such as looking up a map based on a given address.

The problem with Accelerators is that they are not really based on a selection; that is, they lack semantics. When you highlight an address, you still have to decide which Accelerator to use. If you have dozens of Accelerators installed, this quickly becomes hard to manage. Firefox has recognized the issue with the menu-driven approach and instead offers its contextual technology via text. Called Ubiquity, this contextual technology is still only available as an add-on today but is likely to be a part of Firefox core soon.

Marketed as user-generated mashups, Ubiquity is actually a contextual technology based on language. As with Accelerators, the user is able to select a piece of text and then invoke Ubiquity and type a command. In the screenshot above, Ubiquity is used to insert a map into an email. Hundreds of Ubiquity commands have been implemented to date. ReadWriteWeb has already written about Ubiquity commands.

Will Context be the Future of the Web?

So where is all of this heading? Are these technologies signal or noise? We believe we are witnessing the birth of a fundamentally new kind of web, a smarter one, a contextual one. Unlike the old web we are used to, this one understands what we are doing and helps us. It is a web in which we search less and find relevant content faster. This new contextual web is still very young and unevenly distributed, but it is definitely here.

The fact that these contextual technologies are springing up is not accidental. The Contextual web is made possible by our push into semantic web and the rise of web services/API culture. The combination of basic semantics and API is fueling all of these contextual applications. Bit by bit, the web is getting smarter, friendlier, and more enjoyable.

Web browsers are in the best position to deliver these new contextual experiences to users because of their wide reach. The fact that Microsoft made Accelerators its flagship feature for Internet Explorer 8 and that Mozilla is putting much effort into Ubiquity tells us that contexual browsing is a priority. This is really good news, because these technologies bring great benefits to the user.

It is great to see that in these tough economic times, evolution is brewing. The tremendous effort that all of these companies are making with contextual technologies is beginning to come to fruition. It may be that we are seeing glimpses of what the next generation of the web will be like.

And now, as usual, let's turn the tables. Tell us examples of your favorite contextual browsing technologies. Do you think context will be play significant part in the next evolution of the web?

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 Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox extension that allows users to change the layout and functionality of web pages. Every month hundreds of people write and release Greasemonkey "scripts" that anyone can add to their browser with a single click.

A good Greasemonkey script will change your daily use of the web in ways you can't imagine being without. In the post below we highlight our seven favorite scripts published in the last month and offer a quick screencast that will show you how to use Greasemonkey in less than 5 minutes.

]]> How to Start Using Greasemonkey in Less Than Five Minutes

Earlier this year we made a post introducing new users to Greasemonkey and it's still one of our favorite things to point friends to. The words Greasemonkey and "scripts" might sound intimidating, but anyone can use them. It may take some technical skill to write these scripts, but anyone can use them to change their web experience.

RSS readers can click here to view the video.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)

Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.

If you set up Greasemonkey and ad nothing but the old standby Autopagerize script, you'll already be thankful that you did!

Our Newest Favorites

Userscripts.org is the primary place to find new Greasemonkey scripts but there are literally hundreds posted every month. We took several hours this weekend to go through the last month of new and updated scripts on the site, we tested many more than we've highlighted here, and now we'd like to share our favorites. Some are new, some are just updated, all are very easy to use. Exploring all these scripts took a long time, but they can change how you use the web every day in just a few minutes.

We hope that after we share our favorites, you'll leave comments pointing us to scripts we haven't found yet.

Learning Page Popularity

Google Reader Subscriber Count

Google Reader has an API that will show you how many subscribers a feed has there. This script puts that number in a little box in the bottom right corner of any page with Google Reader subscribers. For most blogs you can multiply this number by 2 or 3 and get an estimate of the total number of subscribers in all RSS readers.

You can find out all kinds of interesting things with this script. I knew, for example, that web comic XKCD was wildly popular - but I wouldn't have suspected it was as popular as it is. Now I know. (To tell the truth it was another Greasemonkey script, Google FX, that pointed me at XKCD as a related search in earlier testing!) I also know that the "featured slideshows" feed at Slideshare.net has hardly any subscribers at all - that's a shame but it makes me think I could find more hidden treasures there.

For Gmail

Change gmail logo

Many of us spend hours every day using GMail but that doesn't mean we have to look at the official GMail logo all the time. This script makes it easy to put a different image in that space. In this case there are a couple of steps involved, but it's really not that hard.

Once you've got Greasemonkey installed, go to the link for this script and add that too. Then, follow the link on the script page to the image file converter and upload the image you want to make your new Gmail logo. The converter page will give you a long set of characters that you can copy and paste into the Greasemonkey script on your computer. Just go in your browser to the "tools" menu, then Greasemonkey, then manage scripts. Select this one, edit it and then paste the code you got into the space in the file that's described in the instructions in the text file.

We tried a number of different image sizes, trying to keep our images from being cropped, and finally found success in a 115X60px shot of my fiancee and I at the beach where we got engaged! Now I look at that every time I open GMail instead of the GMail logo!

GMail Label Sorting

We're already using GMail labels more now that our most recently used ones are moved automatically to the top of the label list, thanks to this script. It works much better than numbering labels to overcome the alphabetization, as we've done before.

For Wikipedia

Add Wikidatabase History to Every Wikipedia Page

Wikipedia is great if you make sure not to take anything there on face value. A page's edit history is almost as important as its content and this script adds a drop down box on every page that shows its edit history.

For Videos

Video Embed

This script puts a video player on a page when there's a link to a YouTube page that appears. It's a time saver and will probably help you actually watch more videos that people are sharing if they are right there on the page for you. It can mess up the layout a little bit to have a video player thrown onto the page, but that's usually ok.

For Twitter

There are a whole lot of cool Greasemonkey scripts out there for Twitter, but here are some of our recent favorites. See the screen shot below to see how they all look together.

Add search to twitter sidebar

Search.twitter.com is really understated in its placement on the Twitter site. This script ads a search box to the sidebar of every Twitter page!

Twitter sidebar replies

It's always nice to get some context whenever looking at a person's Twitter profile page. This script places the most recent public replies they've received on their profile page sidebar.

Nested twitter replies

The lack of nested replies is something that people used to complain a lot about in Twitter. This script inserts them into every page - making previously one-sided conversations immediately comprehensible.

What Are Your Favorites?

Those are our favorite new Greasemonkey scripts from the last month, what are some of your favorites? Greasemonkey is one of our favorite things about the web - there's so much it can do! We'd love for you to share links here to your favorite scripts so we can all give them a try. There's no need to accept the web as it's delivered to you - it's in your browser so you can interact with it almost however you like!]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/greasemonkey_the_7_best_new_browser_tweaks_from_november_and_how_to_use_them.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/greasemonkey_the_7_best_new_browser_tweaks_from_november_and_how_to_use_them.php How To Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:19:09 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Search engines are great at retrieving textual information, but even though a lot of search results today are actually videos, most search engines still only display a text link to those videos. A new Greasemonkey script from VideoSurf changes this by adding small film strips to every video that appears in your search results on Google and Yahoo, as well as to every video on YouTube's search results page.

]]> The Greasemonkey script works for videos from YouTube and MetaCafe. It would be great if VideoSurf also supported other services like DailyMotion, Vimeo, or Viddler, but given YouTube's domination of the video market, this probably won't matter too much.

VideoSurf, which by itself is a very good video search engine, uses its proprietary algorithms to identify the most interesting moments in these videos and allows you to jump right to them by clicking on the images in the film strip.

The only problem with this script is that it won't take you to directly to YouTube or MetaCafe to see the video, but to VideoSurf itself. This makes sense, given that the script is a way to promote VideoSurf's search engine, but it would be nice if you could have a choice of destinations.

Overall, this is one of the coolest and more useful Greasemonkey scripts we have seen lately and definitely worth a try.

Here is how to install the script:

1. Install the Greasemonkey extension for FireFox (if you don't have it installed already) and restart your browser.
2. Click on this link to the script and then follow the instructions on screen.
3. You're done. Start searching!

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/videosurf_adds_film_strips_to.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/videosurf_adds_film_strips_to.php Product Reviews Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:04:20 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Popular social bookmarking service Delicious says today is its 5th birthday. While this author was disappointing several years ago that it was Yahoo and not the Library of Congress that acquired the company, Delicious remains one of the most powerful and useful services on the web.

To mark its big day, we offer below two videos. The first an introduction to the tool for readers still unfamiliar and the second a screencast demonstrating just how easy and useful it is to make 5 changes to your Delicious experience. Those changes took us under 5 minutes.

]]> From collaboration to personal learning to expert source discovery - there are many, many things you can do with a good social bookmarking service. Delicious is the only such service with millions of users (the company said today that 5.3 million users have saved 180 million URLs to date) and that scale makes it what it is.

We also want to take this opportunity to thank the Delicious team and especially now post-Yahoo founder Joshua Schachter, for making this awesome service what it is. We really appreciate it.

First, an Introduction

Thanks to CommonCraft for another great video.

And Now for Something New

The following video demonstrated five of our favorite ways to use Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey to radically change the Delicious experience. This is really easy to do, as you'll see, and we've included all the links below the video. With just a handful of clicks you can integrate Delicious into sites like Google Reader and Digg, you can sort and view Delicious in brand new ways, and make a number of other changes.

Note that there's no audio in this video, we just went through the steps. We hope that's ok for readers but if you'd prefer it be narrated, let us know.

Links shown in the screencast:

Greasemonkey

Delicious for google reader

Sort by popularity or other

digg.licio.us

subscribe in delicious

Favicious

Autopagerize

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_great_delicious_hacks_in.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_great_delicious_hacks_in.php How To Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:59:47 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Upcoming.org founder Andy Baio and Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter have released a project called Memeorandum Colors. It's an easy-to-install Greasemonkey plug-in that shows the political bias of past linking behavior on blogs aggregated by Memeorandum, the political sister-site of tech aggregator Techmeme.

In this heated election season, Memeorandum is a huge asset for following politics online, but it's hard for the casual observer to get the most out of the conversation by merely visiting the site. Memeorandum Colors adds a whole new layer of clarity and sophistication to the site by color-coding algorithmically categorized liberal and conservative blogs.

]]> How It Works

Memeorandum, like Techmeme, tracks hot conversations in the blogosphere by seeing who is linking to whom. Every 5 minutes these sites check to see what the break out topics are and then organize them by link-hub and conversation links. See the screenshot I took a few minutes ago.

Memeorandum Colors takes the history of what 50,000 blogs indexed by Memeorandum have linked to and analyzes them for patterns. Schachter and Baio found that there were two clear groups of blogs that tended to link together. Presumably they looked at them and determined that one group was conservative and the other, liberal. Interestingly, the two ran the same algorithm on the blogs in Techmeme and found that the blogs there are split into two groups as well - business vs. technology.

The Greasemonkey script then color codes each blog in shades of red or blue, depending on how consistently they've linked with the conservative or liberal pack in the past. The end result is that when you load the Memeorandum site, you can see which kinds of blogs are clustering around a common node, which story nodes are of such general interest that they cross party lines and which brave conservative blogs step out of the norm and link to liberal sources and vice versa. This author was just complaining yesterday about how hard it is to find out what liberal blogs have to say about conservative conversations on Memeorandum without a lot of knowledge about who the leading blogs are in each camp. Problem solved!

This is an awesome example of the kinds of magic services that can be created by analyzing aggregate data around user generated content. We love this kind of stuff.

If you've never used Greasemonkey before, we assure you - it's much easier than it sounds! Just download the official Firefox plug-in and then click on any Greasemonkey script link to install it. Honestly, two or three mouse clicks and you're cooking with gas. If it helps you can watch our screencast How to Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes.

For an in depth technical discussion of how Memorandum Colors was created and to grab the Memeorandum Colors script, see Baio's fabulous blog Waxy.org. I'm off to see what moderate conservative blogs have to say about reports of extreme hostility at Republican political rallies!

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/memorandum_colors_xray_glasses.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/memorandum_colors_xray_glasses.php Browsers Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:50:24 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick While Google only announced its own browser last Tuesday and did not include an API in this first release that would allow developers to create extensions for it, Japanese developer Kazuho Oku found a way to run userscripts on Google Chrome. While its functionality is still limited, Greasemetal is already showing a lot of promise and works exactly as advertised, even though it is not compatible with all Greasemonkey scripts yet.

]]> As of now, Greasemetal is definitely still rough around its edges. It does not have a user interface for managing scripts, for example. Instead, you have to copy them into a directory in your My Documents folder, which is not exactly user-friendly, but works just fine. The developers promise, however, that the next version will include a UI for managing scripts directly in the browser.

Scripts that make calls specific to Greasemonkey will most likely not work yet. If you are looking for compatible scripts, the developer suggests that you start with scripts that are already compatible with Safari or Opera, which limits your choices, but it's important to keep in mind that this is only a first release.

We tried out the oAutoPagerize script for Safari, and it seemed to work right out of the box. Your mileage with other script may vary.

Note: To run Greasemetal, you have to start the Greasemetal executable and not Chrome itself.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/greasemetal_greasemonkey_for_g.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/greasemetal_greasemonkey_for_g.php News Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:16:08 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write Javascript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.

It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4 minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.

]]> We hope readers will add comments with some of your favorite Greasemonkey scripts for people to check out as well.

What Is Greasemonkey?

Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to insert Javascript into the local display of web pages in your browser. Nothing changes for anyone else, but images, links or text can be added or hidden automatically when you visit a web page that a script has been written for. Developers have written these little scripts to customize or improve the way different web sites are experienced. It's a powerful, lightweight platform that we think you'll really enjoy using.

For nontechnical users, "script" may be an intimidating word, but we think of it as a plug-in for the plug-in. The user experience is that simple.

How do I Use It?

Below you'll find a four minute screencast walking you through the process of setting up Greasemonkey and running some of our favorite scripts. Links and text are below the video. RSS readers can click here to view the video.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)

Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.

Find scripts to install. Most are at Userscripts.org but the ones we reference in the video above are:
AutoPagerize
Better GMail 2
FriendFeed User Profiles
FriendFeed Better Recommended
Greased Lightbox

There's a whole room in FriendFeed dedicated to sharing and discussing new Greasemonkey scripts.

We wrote about Greasemonkey Scripts for the Social Media Addict in May, but the options available grow fast and furious.

Questions? Suggestions?

If there's anything unclear about this, let us know and we or our readers will respond in questions. Likewise, if there are Greasemonkey scripts you think readers here should be sure to see - let us know what they are.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_start_using_greasemonkey.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_start_using_greasemonkey.php How To Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:37:15 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick