ReadWriteWeb

From TV to Tivo and Hulu, from the mall to Amazon and eCommerce and from newspaper carriers and delivery trucks to online syndication and subscription - distribution of goods, services and information has changed a lot thanks to the internet. Subscription to syndicated publications hasn't changed nearly as much yet as it could in the future, though.

Services like MyYahoo and iGoogle saw some traction and many readers here may have a Google Reader account, but dedicated RSS (really simple syndication) feed reading services have never lived up to their potential to become a mainstream phenomenon. These days many people say they just wait until links get shared on Twitter and they never use a feed reader at all. Late last week Facebook threw its hat in the ring and called on users to use its service as a news feed reader. There are a number of reasons why Facebook could be the strongest online subscription option yet.

Update: Hard numbers have now confirmed that Facebook is already the biggest news reader on the web. In our next post on the subject, we discuss the implications of Facebook's relatively small market share on the future of free thinking.

Google just announced an interesting update to Google Reader. Google's online feed reader now allows you to track changes on any page - even those that don't feature an RSS feed. Google will create its own custom feeds for these sites and update the feed whenever it notices a change. Google Reader will display a short snippet of the page changes in the RSS feed.

5 years ago I wrote a prediction about RSS here on ReadWriteWeb. I proclaimed that "in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people."

I think it's fair to say that I was totally wrong on that prediction. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, in particular, many more people 'subscribe' to people than topics (subscribe a.k.a. 'follow' or 'friend'). And I'm glad my prediction didn't pan out, because the social graph of people is much more interesting to follow than a bunch of keywords. But it begs the question: what happened to all the promise of tracking topics using RSS?

Every now and then, we come across cool apps that allow geeks to conveniently manage their musical tastes in a way that encourages more real-world fun.

Last year, we met up with Livekick's founders in New York to talk about their very thorough site for helping web geeks get out to more shows and concerts. Today, we've discovered Roadie, a much simpler app that focuses on album releases. Roadie creates an RSS feed or iCal based on a user's Last.fm favorite acts or a custom list of manually entered bands. Essentially, it allows users to keep up with album releases quickly and painlessly.

Recently I wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. I noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments.

What I learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Not to mention new tools worth checking out. So in this more optimistic post, I list 5 reasons why you should continue to use RSS Readers.

One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to. I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me.

Frankly I'm more likely to use Google Reader to search for specific information nowadays, than to scan my subscribed feeds for their latest posts. So what's happened to RSS Readers. Do people still use them and is there still a viable market for them?

Feedly, the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year, is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work.

According to a post on Google's Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly "real-time," using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future - the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.

Could a more eye-catching approach to syndication make RSS more accesible to mainstream users outside the geekosphere? Two new websites have just launched that rely on such a strategy gaining traction.

Spectives and Readfresh are the sites in question, and both offer thumbnail images and a limited amount of text. Readfresh monitors sites and brings the most recently updated sites to the top of a user's page, allowing users to see what's new at a glance. Spectives, on the other hand, gives users "one page, a lot of pictures, updating constantly" from RSS feeds and websites. Read on for a side-by-side comparison and our assessment.

The New York Times just released an interesting new tool that allows users to filter articles from the newspaper's website by tags and keywords and turn them into custom feeds. While developers could already build similar tools on top of the paper's Article Search API and TimesTags API, the new Custom Times Feeds give everybody the ability to create persistent searches based on their personal preferences.

Tweets on Twitter, you can favorite them - but do people take the time to? It turns out they do and someone's probably been favoriting Tweets from you, too. Favstar is a new service that tracks the most favorited tweets tweeted and finds some pretty funny stuff that way. The service will also tell you who's been favoriting your tweets though - and tonight it added RSS notification to its features.

That means you can now subscribe to an RSS feed showing you who likes your Tweets, even if they didn't reply, retweet or respond otherwise. That's interesting information to know.

All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in (using this plug-in) will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer's brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon. Update: Within hours another RSS reader called LazyFeed has announced that it will support RSSCloud as well.

RSSCloud is an element that's always been present in the RSS 2.0 spec but has drawn new attention with the rise of interest in the Real-Time Web. The element was just added to the WordPress code this afternoon. The implications of this big vote of support go beyond reading WordPress blogs; this is the kind of traction that new technologies can leverage to gain support in many different applications.

Regator, the popular blog directory and feed reader, just launched its iPhone application (iTunes link). The app, which is available for free, allows users to browse stories from over 500 topics, ranging from travel blogs to pop culture and sports blogs - with a bit of beekeeping and local news from around the world thrown in for good measure. Every one of these topics is curated by Regator's staff, which ensures that only high-quality blog feeds make it into the app. Every topic also comes with its own memetracker-like 'popular' view and a list of currently trending terms within each category.

NewsGator, the company behind the popular FeedDemon and NetNewsWire feed readers, just announced that it will shut down the NewsGator Online Reader on August 31, 2009. The company will provide users with instructions on how to migrate to Google Reader. NewsGator's desktop and mobile feed readers already support synchronization with Google Reader. Until today, though, users could choose between syncing with NewsGator or Google Reader. New versions of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire for the Mac will be available today. A new version of NewsGator's iPhone app will also arrive in the App Store soon.

Google Reader offers a nifty mobile interface, and apps like Byline (iTunes link) and NetNewsWire (iTunes link) are well-designed native apps that allow iPhone users to keep up with their feeds. But slogging through a few hundred subscriptions on the iPhone's small screen can quickly turn into a frustrating experience. My6Sense, which launched the first beta of its web-based mobile feed reader last December, is now finally ready to release its native iPhone app. Thanks to the app's ability to organize your feeds according to a personalized recommendation system that automatically learns from your preferences as you browse through your feeds, keeping up with hundreds of feeds on the iPhone is now easier than ever before.

VoloMedia, a podcast analytics, advertising, and distribution company, just received a patent for "providing episodic media," including podcasts. According to the company, which filed for the patent in November 2003, U.S. Patent 7,568,213 covers all episodic media downloads, not just the RSS-dependent downloads that power today's podcasts. VoloMedia CEO Murgesh Navar says that the company doesn't plan to go after individual podcasters, but that the company plans to "work collaboratively with key participants in the industry." We do wonder, however, if VoloMedia can really claim to have invented podcasting in 2003, given that the concept was already under development by Dave Winer and others in late 2000 and early 2001.

RSS feeds for Google News search results have been broken for about three weeks, according to complaints in the company's help forum. Three weeks ago a Google engineer said they expected the problem to be fixed in about a week. Now the company has simply removed the links in the results page sidebar to both RSS and Google Alerts. Oops.

Inbal Drukker, a senior associate at Google News, said on the first and sixth of July that there are "engineering changes" underway to "improve Google News." So what seems like a loss today could end up for the better in the long run, but for now there seems to be a problem.

Have you ever wanted to create an iPhone app, but can't code your way out of a wet paper bag? Users of NewsGator's NetNewsWire iPhone news reader will have to wait a little longer for the next version of that application because its creator, Brent Simmons, has been busy working on a new iPhone framework called TapLynx. The goal of TapLynx is to help users generate topic-focused media applications for the iPhone without any programming required. The first application, created by Simmons, has already been built for All Things Digital.

Feedinvader is an interesting Firefox plugin that combines an online feed reader with a news ticker right underneath your bookmarks bar. The feed reader in the back-end is currently mostly for managing the feeds in the ticker, but with a bit of additional work, it could also become a great reader in its own right.

The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story's excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.

The PR Firm MWW Group has just launched a new, cross-platform mobile application designed to bring the best RSS content to those in the public relations, marketing, and advertising fields. The application, called M.insight, features hand-selected RSS feeds from blogs and news sites which deliver relevant articles which you can read and enjoy without the hassle of having to set up and configure an RSS reader.