ReadWriteWeb

News and activity feeds are more alive today than ever before, even as engagement with their simplest format, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), appears to be waning. What were the Top 10 Most Awesome RSS & Feed Products of 2011? We offer our list below. Though some of these weren't born in the past year, all of them have made a big impact and are thoroughly awesome.

Anyone with an interest in competitive knowledge work should be aware of and give some thought to these applications. We'd love to hear your thoughts on others in comments below, too, readers. I've put the following 10 in a particular order: from the most geeky to the most mainstream.

Google Currents is a new tablet app that launched today. It makes reading of syndicated web content easier, faster and more enjoyable than almost any other interface you can imagine. It's like Flipboard but for RSS feeds. People are going to love it. That's the nice way to describe it.

You could also call it the sterilization of the social web. Just like today's new Twitter redesign it makes things nice and pretty for non-technical users. Google Currents is infinitely friendlier and more accessible than any RSS reader, even Google's own Reader. Unfortunately, in the current application that ease of use comes at a great cost: Google Currents does away with many of the best parts of the social web. It sings a catchy tune, but there's far less life inside the experience. It's not just a bummer, either - it's a threat to what's great about blogging.

Last week, the Google Reader team caused quite a stir among many users when it launched a redesigned version of the popular RSS feed reading service. The relaunch not only gave Google Reader a new design, but removed the service's content-sharing and social features in an attempt to streamline the product and drive more people toward Google+. While the company did add a "Share" button of its own to Reader today, it still pushes posts to Google+ and doesn't quite restore the way the product used to work.

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

Feedly just launched version 6.0 of its free RSS reader for desktop Web browsers, Android and iOS. The app can now act as a client for your Tumblr account. You can read and reblog posts from within the colorful reader. It also sports some new curated topics, called "essentials," ranging from "Apple" and "Data Visualization" to "Do It Yourself" and "Gardening." Visually, the minimal app has teamed up with Vladstudio to provide some cute and colorful themes.

Feedly has also gotten more social. Previous versions had buggy sharing features, but those have been fixed, and today's release also adds Google Plus integration. Finally, the new features all sync across platforms, between the plug-ins for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and the mobile apps for phones and tablets.

Private group messaging apps are hot. The Monday after Skype acquired year-old startup GroupMe for a reported $85 million, a team of innovators who lead the ultimately unsuccessful but very important charge to popularize RSS feeds has regrouped to build and launch a new group messaging app called Glassboard.

Glassboard launched in the iTunes, Android and Windows Phone app stores this morning and it's a good, solid, simple app for communicating across multiple different topical "boards" on your phone. If you've got a group of people you want to communicate with for a short or long period of time, from your phone, with commenting, media and location sharing, then Glassboard could be the app for you.

How would you like to have a "cognitive prosthetic" that could "adapt to unexpected events" in situations of "intense information overload"...as a personal newsreader app online? That sounds pretty hot and it's exactly what startup TrapIt was when it spun out of DARPA's $200 million research project CALO (Cognitive Assistant That Learns and Organizes) more than a year ago.

TrapIt begins to open up its next-generation newsreader today (the first 500 people to visit this link can try it out for themselves) and I've been testing it this afternoon. My verdict so far? It's attractive, the user experience is pretty good, it seems like its smarts could deliver some meaningful value with ongoing use - but like so many newsreading services trying to go mainstream, the quantity of news it delivers is just too small.

Private mobile content sharing for groups is something no one has really nailed yet, but feels like it could be a very big deal. Rising from the tragic ashes of the consumer RSS reader market, a new team that includes NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons, FeedDemon creator Nick Bradbury and Newsgator's VP of Mobile and Data Walker Fenton will announce Wednesday at Apple's WWDC that it is spinning off from parent company Newsgator to create a new app called Glassboard.

Glassboard, which will open to the public next month, will allow iOS and Android users to share text, photos and in some cases location with small groups. It is built with Microsoft Azure as its back-end and will integrate with Microsoft's forthcoming Office 365. The team is being intentionally "agnostic" about its target market, saying it could be used by families, work teams or companies and their clients. These guys have built some incredible things in the past and it will be very interesting to see what they can bring to one of the biggest potential markets of the day.

Twitter has begun offering an embeddable button for one-click subscription to a Twitter account associated with any website, called the Follow Button. Previously, a website owner could link to their Twitter profile page off-site but users had to visit that Twitter page and click to follow the account from there.

Users interested in subscribing to updates from a website itself can, as always, subscribe to the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds offered by many sites for years. Those are the orange buttons with the little white lines on them, and without the word Subscribe. RSS requires the use of a different application, called an RSS reader, where a user is probably less likely to encounter poorly written little jokes or the daily ennui of Hollywood starlets. Or your mom, who is more likely to Tweet than knowingly publish an RSS feed.

Earlier this month, entrepreneur and blogger Jesse Stay noticed that both Facebook and Twitter had completely removed support for RSS from of their websites. After much outcry from the tech community, Facebook relented and re-added an RSS link to Facebook Pages once again. Twitter, however, did nothing.

But now, one developer has taken it upon himself to build a tool that uses Twitter's API (application programming interface) to create RSS feeds. The code, called "Twitter API 2 RSS," is now available on GitHub here.

This morning, alternative search engine service blekko announced a partnership with hot iPad social magazine Flipboard to power its content searches. Under the new deal, users looking for new content to subscribe to within Flipboard can discover and browse for items by keyword. The content will come from RSS feeds, the Web feed format used to publish regularly updated news in a structured format. But unlike with traditional RSS readers, like Google Reader, for example, the feeds will not be displayed in the typical inbox-like view often associated with feed-reading services. Instead, the feeds will be displayed in Flipboard's magazine-like format for a more visually attractive experience.

RSS dead? Hardly.