In Opera 9.6, a new feed preview feature has been introduced that turns any RSS feed into a magazine-style page where the articles in an feed appear as columns. (See image below). With the feeds laid out in this manner, suddenly RSS reading becomes accessible, understandable, and far less geeky than its acronym implies. Although heavy RSS users and techie folks will probably continue to use an RSS reader like Google Reader, a magazine-style layout is a great option for a light reader or someone new to RSS.

Previewing RWW's Feed

In a way, Opera's new magazine-style feature reminds us very much of how the Firefox extension, Feedly, operates. With Feedly installed, you can view your Google Reader feeds in an easy-to-read format while still being able to hop into your different folders. Of course, Feedly does so much more than just change the layout of Google Reader, but that's a whole other topic.

The difference between Feedly's magazine interface and what Opera does is that Opera only displays feeds in this manner when you preview them while deciding whether or not to subscribe. That's disappointing. We were hoping that Opera would include this as a new option under the "Display -> View" settings in Opera's built-in RSS reader, too. Unfortunately, those view settings have remained the same. Feed reading there is still an inbox-like experience, with feeds titles in one window and the articles in a second window. This familiar Outlook format works for some people, we're sure, but to have the magazine-style option here as well would have been a nice treat.

Other New Features

In addition to the preview feeds feature, Opera 9.6 also adds other updates, including the following:

• Expanded Opera Link: Opera Link is one of the browser's best features. With it, you have access to your data from any computer or mobile device. It synchronizes your bookmarks, Speed Dial, notes taken in your Opera browser, and personal bar. With the update to Opera 9.6, Opera Link now lets you take your favorite search engines and browser history with you, too.
• Optimized Opera Mail: Opera's built-in e-mail client, Opera Mail, now includes "low-bandwidth mode" to retrieve mails even faster when bandwidth is limited. This is great for when you're on the road and trying to use your air card in a bad spot where the signal isn't very strong.
• Prioritized e-mail: Opera Mail has two new ways to manage e-mail conversations. Keep an eye on important threads and contacts by following them, or ignore less important threads and contacts with a single click. Looks like you can start to manage your information overload with this.
• Increased speed: Opera 9.6 improves the quick responsiveness and page loading of Opera 9.5.
• Improved fluency: Opera added support for Indonesian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil languages.

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.

Build A Custom Search Engine Using Your Social Bookmarks

Last week, Yahoo finally unveiled the long-awaited new version of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Along with the new URL, simply delicious.com, the site got a revamped UI and added new features like selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks. However, amid the delighted oohs and ahhs from the tech community over the new-and-improved site, some people were raising the valid question: "Who bookmarks anymore?" Besides bookmarking for the sake of making sure a site gets seen in your FriendFeed stream, the truth is that many people bookmark, but then turn to Google search when they actually want to find something.

Mainstream Web Watch: The Olympics & Online Video

The Beijing Olympics started this week and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

Mainstreaming RSS: Regator is Now in Public Beta

We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but this week, it has opened up its doors for a public beta release. Since we first covered Regator, the developers have made some important changes to their service, including the ability to upload OPML files. Even with this feature, though, Regator still remains a highly curated service, where every new entry in its blog directory has to be approved by the editors.

Microsoft Relaunches Windowslive.com as a Community Site

Until now, Microsoft had used WindowsLive.com as the main hub for getting information about its Live branded services like Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, SkyDrive, and Photo Gallery. This week, Microsoft re-launched the site as a community site, where users can exchange information and ideas about how to best use these tools. As Marty Collins, the Windows Live senior marketing manager explained to us in an interview last week, the idea behind this redesign is to better explain to users how they can use these services together, as well as fostering an active user community.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

What's Your Vision of the Future of the Web? Mozilla Wants to Know

Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. Mozilla Labs has put out a call for anyone in the world to share their vision of how they would like to see the browser, or the web in general, look and act in the future. Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

The Future of Blogging Revealed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about "Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities." However, we're wondering if people even need to blog anymore...at least in the traditional sense.

The Olympics & Social Media Marketing

This week we looked at how Web technology is being used in the Beijing Olympics. In this post we check out how some of the world's leading brands are using social media tools in their Olympics campaigns. Our first post discussed how online video will be a big part of this Olympics, which is great for consumers. The Web can also be a boon for brands too, when it comes to major sporting events.

Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?

One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.

As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Back in 2005, though, we called Bloglines the "Google of RSS," and even today, Bloglines is still slightly ahead of Google Reader in terms of its user base.

Also in 2005, a number of long discussions about advertising on Bloglines and in RSS aggregators in general kept the blogosphere quite busy. Back then, many publishers protested when Bloglines announced that it was planning to put contextual ads next to their content, and in the end, Bloglines backed off from the idea and did not feature any advertising on its site until today. This early controversy around advertising in RSS aggregators probably also led most of Bloglines' competitors like Newsgator or Google Readerto shy away from putting ads on their services as well.

For Now, Ads on Start Page Only

The difference this time, however, is that Bloglines is only putting the ads on the start page, where Bloglines only displays information about the service itself and doesn't feature any external content. According to a post on the Bloglines blog, Bloglines is also pursuing other monetization options within the feed reader, though the post does not go into any specifics.

Bring Your Own OPML

One of our main issues we had with the earlier incarnation of Regator was that you couldn't import your own OPML files, which seemed to restrict it quite a bit as an RSS reader for more advanced users. While Regator now allows you to upload your own OPML files, your imported feeds will only be visible to you because of Regator's approach of personally vetting all feeds shown on the site. At the same time, Regator will look at every imported feed and consider them for inclusion in the general index, which turns uploading your OPML file into a recommendation mechanism.

New Features

Also new in this release is the ability to share post via Twitter, Facebook, and email. Besides this, Regator spent a lot of time polishing and tweaking the service, as well as adding a few minor features. For the near future, Regator is also expecting to give its users a unique page for shared posts akin to Google's Shared Items pages.

What About Advanced Users?

In our earlier review, we said that Regator was a great resource for mainstream users and maybe even a good introduction to RSS in general. With the ability to upload custom OPML files and the soon to be released Shared Items pages, Regator is now closer to being worth a second look for more advanced users as well. What does hold it back for power users, though, is still the fact that it only displays summaries of articles and doesn't display any images in those summaries. There are good reasons for that, including the fact that the folks at Regator want to give traffic back to those who write the content, but it does make the site just a bit less useful in comparison to a regular RSS reader.

Not For You? That's OK

If you haven't checked out Alltop since its launch, it's probably because you fall more into the earlier adopter set - you were interested in taking a look at the shiny new site at the time, but you're still more than happy with your RSS reader and see no reason to switch. For early adopters like us, using a site like Alltop seems be like moving backwards. That's OK - that's as it should be.

We tend to use services like Google Reader or a configurable start page like Netvibes to read our feeds and this is fine for us. However, we're not necessarily representative of the masses. Not everyone wants to tweak and customize their own personal reader - they simply want a web destination where they can catch up on the news. Alltop can serve that purpose.

Nudge People Into RSS With Alltop

Alltop is also a great resource for getting people started with RSS. Next time you're trying to explain RSS to a friend, you can just send them a link to an Alltop page instead with a note saying "here's a great example of RSS in use." There are so many different subjects covered now, it's easy to find a page (or two or three) that your friend would enjoy, no matter their interests. They've got pages on countries (ex: Argentina), Sports (ex: Hockey), religions (ex: Muslim), activities (ex: crafts), educational resources (ex: personal finance), professions (ex: sales), events (ex: summer Olympics), and so many more.

When your friend returns to you after a while asking if they can add another web site to their Alltop page, you'll know that it's then time to move them into a more robust RSS solution like Netvibes, for example. Alltop was just their training wheels - now they're ready to ride.

Web 2.0 For Beginners

Not only can Alltop help people get into RSS, it's also useful for those just signing up with various Web 2.0 services for the first time. One of the problems with getting into the social web is that when you come so late the game, you don't even know where to begin. The early adopter set has been re-creating their friend graph on numerous sites for years - we know who's interesting to us, who our friends are, who we want to avoid, etc. A Web 2.0 beginner, on the other hand, signs up for a service like Twitter or FriendFeed, and is at a loss.

But that's where a service like Alltop is, again, very useful. When your friend asks you who to follow, you can point them to the Twitterati and Frienderati "starter packs." Here, they can pick and chose from those sites' more prominent users. (They even have the Utterati covered now - who knows what next? Identerati?)

Conclusion

Alltop may not be the most glamorous of today's web resources, but its extensive pages are great tools to nudge people towards the more complex apps we embrace today as both techies and social media enthusiasts. As representatives of this movement, be it the "groundswell", social media, Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, we need to think about how we can make transitions easier for those who still live very much inside the web 1.0 bubble (besides the occasional foray into MySpace, that is). Alltop is certainly a tool that can help with that move, which is why we felt like revisiting this application today.

Someone once called Alltop a "big pile of nothing" (you know who!). They couldn't have been more wrong. You may not have a use for Alltop yourself, but it's time you showed it to your mom and dad.

When you're reading any item from a particular feed, you'll notice thumbs up/thumbs down buttons at the top for voting and a button that keeps track of how many votes a particular post has received. There's also an option to email the article to a friend or bookmark it for yourself.

Viewing a Post on FeedzZ

However, what's really interesting are the tags at the bottom of the post. These tags aren't generated by people, but by the underlying semantic technologies. For example, our recent post "Watch Out Silicon Valley: Here Comes NYC" was tagged: new york michael bloomberg internet week web-oriented technologies seed-stage technology fund. There's also a "related entries" link which displays a list of posts with at least one of the same tags. In this example, thanks to the tag "New York," there were several unrelated entries listed here, but there was also a link to an article about the NYC Seed Fund. So in this case, the more accurate results came from just viewing the "internet week" tag.

In addition to the tags on each post, every page of FeedzZ has an automatically generated, semantically created tag cloud on the left which you can use to see all the posts about a particular subject (Example: Bill Gates).

Issues With FeedzZ

Of course, these related entries and tags could become infinitely more useful if you were to upload your own OPML file. Unfortunately, for true feed junkies that's probably something that will have to wait, since FeedzZ currently imposes a limit on OPML file sizes, restricting them 100 KB or less. (At 142 KB for my subscription list, I was out of luck).

FeedzZ is certainly an interesting experiment in semantics, but that being said, the site still needs a lot more finesse to really be successful. The OPML restriction is only one of the issues. Even if you manage to get your OPML uploaded, it's difficult to determine how to proceed with the data you've imported. You have to find your way into your profile section (no link is provided) and then you have to create a folder structure and classify your feeds. Shouldn't a semantic system know where the feeds belong? When I tried this, I couldn't even classify my feeds manually. Although I clicked the "Classify" button, there was never a feed in the drop-down list to select (see below), so I couldn't proceed. It's as if that piece of the web site was not even built yet.

Attempting to Classify a Feed

These types of issues are major problems in terms of usability, so it's hard to truly recommend the site at this time. However, if these problems were resolved, FeedzZ could then have a shot at being a useful online feed aggregator or even a great research tool for finding related news items on the topics that interest you. It's great that FeedzZ has managed to get the semantic RSS technologies working, but now they need to turn their attention to the user experience and UI design so we all can appreciate their efforts.

An RSS reader like illumio could have a real shot at marketshare among the digerati if not for a few issues. The app, more of a competitor to the Newsgator desktop reader product line than to online readers, provides automatic filtering of your news feeds. Unlike technologies like AideRSS, which filters by popularity, illumio personalizes your feed reading experience by determining what's important to you and then displaying those top articles in a newspaper layout.

Illumio is not new, but its latest incarnation - illumio version 3.0 - was only released a couple of weeks ago. With this version, the app, although downloadable software, now launches within a web browser window. The UI has also been completely redesigned so articles are easier to read and navigation is simplified.

illumio

However, what's really interesting about illumio is not the fact that you can read your RSS in a newspaper layout - it's the built-in filtering technologies the software employs to do so. In order to determine your interests, illumio scans the files on your computer to discover your interests and expertise. Not to worry, though - this information is never shared with others, nor does it ever leave your PC, according to the company. The privacy-conscious set might find that a little bit disconcerting, but you have to admit - that's certainly a unique approach to uncovering someone's interests in order to personalize their news.

Using illumio

When configuring the software for the first time, you must initially specify some default interests, but after completing the configuration you can remove any unwanted feeds and upload your own OPML file. (It's too bad you can't just start with an OPML upload, though.)

Once you're up-and-running, your feeds are displayed in a newspaper layout that features a tag cloud of topics on the right and your feed groups on the left. You can rate articles with star ratings to further train illumio as to what you like.

There's also a tab at the top of the newspaper called "Questions," because, if it wasn't enough that illumio was a filtered RSS reader of sorts, it's also trying to be a Q&A service, too. Here you can ask questions and respond to those posed by others in the community. While that might be useful in a business environment where team members review feeds together and then discuss as a group, it's hard to see exactly how this would really benefit a typical user.

Recommendation Alone Doesn't Ensure Success

Unfortunately for illumio, their great strides in improving recommendation technologies are going to be overlooked by the community they wish to engage for two major reasons: 1) it's downloadable software, 2) it's Windows only.

While they are working on a Mac version (sign up here to be notified of its release), the fact that illumio is a software download is going to be a huge turn-off for many users. Those at illumio maintain that the reason for it being a download is due to privacy concerns - since it scours your hard drive to assist with its recommendation and filtering services, you wouldn't necessarily want that private data stored online. That being said, most users are looking for filtering and recommendation to occur within their web apps, so illumio doesn't have a chance at converting anyone beyond the already small niche of desktop reader fans.

Instead, Try Newsgator Online

By partnering with a company called SenseArray, NewsGator Online is now offering RSS feed recommendations to its users. These recommendations come from the data NewsGator had been collecting en masse from their users as well as from an individual's actions - like a thumbs up or thumbs down - that were performed in their desktop reader (either FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for the Mac).

This latest news comes on the heels of last month's announcement about Newsgator's incorporation of our favorite filtering service, AideRSS. While both of these technologies are currently only available in Newsgator's online reader, there are plans to make them available in the desktop readers as well.

Additionally, according to a blog post on Venture Chronicles, the company has also been working with mSpoke to provide a categorization capability to their products that will soon offer Wikipedia-style indexing of content.

Newsgator Online, image courtesy of Jeff Nolan

Who Will Win?

With illumio's commitment to being a downloadable product only, Newsgator has the advantage, but even it still faces opposition from the still popular online reader provided by Bloglines as well as the increasingly-popular Google Reader.

Although users are demanding products that provide filtering, it's yet to be seen whether or not they will ditch their currently preferred online readers just to have access to these tools. If anything, Google Reader is one of the worst when it comes to filtering - in fact, its social feature that lets friends share stories means that you are likely to read the same story over and over again. Yet, it is growing in popularity despite its lack of filtering. (That is, unless you just read your friends' shares, which could be see as a type of human fitltering for your RSS.)

However, it is nice to see some forward movement in the recommendation and filtering space, even if it's not available in all readers yet. The fact that it's out there will mean other web apps and desktop readers will need to start offering similar technologies in order to stay competitive.

However, another service that was once exclusively for Google Reader users is expanding to give users a more accurate analysis of what's popular on the web. Today, ReadBurner announced a partnership with the personalized homepage service Netvibes.

The new partnership will allow ReadBurner to analyze and aggregate the activity streams of Netvibes users to incorporate their shared items into ReadBurner. To get started, Netvibes users can head to ReadBurner's "Add A Feed" page and insert their Netvibes username.

Netvibes users can expect their shared items to start appearing in ReadBurner approximately 30 minutes after adding their account. Only the 10 most recent shared items will be immediately pulled in. However, there are plans to expand this to include the latest 30 items. While there will be no counter to display how many times an item was shared via Google Reader versus Netvibes, Netvibes users will be listed in the "Shared by" section in green to better separate the services.

Partnership Responses

It seems that to be the first service to publicly utilize the new APIs for the Netvibes Ginger platform. With the partnership being made possible through the upcoming APIs, ReadBurner's CEO Adam Ostrow has only positive words about working with Netvibes:

Netvibes Ginger is a revolutionary product that truly makes the start page a social experience. We are thrilled to be working with Netvibes to allow their millions of users to help us determine the most important content on the Web in a completely transparent and opt-in way.

VP Product Development of Netvibes, Franck Mahon, was also enthusiastic about partnering with ReadBurner:

We are very focused on making it easy for our users to share their favorite content with their friends or the public. It has really been a pleasure to partner with ReadBurner in testing our APIs and we're really excited about opening Netvibes Ginger activities streams to external applications.

What's in the Future?

There are other services that allow users to share items that have yet to be included in RSS aggregation. Are talks brewing? We sure hope so. We'd love to see shared items from RSS readers such as FeedDemon and the controversial Shftyr included in the aggregation for more accurate statistics and web analysis. For now, users can look forward to more accurate statistics about an item's popularity via ReadBurner's homepage.

I hope that those of you who know and love RSS already enjoyed watching that video again. Big thanks to Common Craft for doing such work, it was no surprise that they were later contracted by Google to make product launch videos for them as well.

Now, let's consider how different a place the world is because of RSS. Some of this is said in a spirit of fun, some of it is very serious.

Without RSS, The Blogosphere Would Die

If no one read your blog, you'd probably not write on it very often. At least for many, many bloggers it's the knowledge that there are people reading that motivates them to write consistently and to write as well as they (we) can. Imagine having to visit every blog you were interested in by entering the URL manually and checking to see if there were new articles posted. If that was the only option, blog readership would plummet and the number of blogs actively published would wither.

RSS allows casual readers to become ongoing subscribers, easily receiving new articles in a convenient way when they are available. A world without RSS (or, of course some other simple syndication protocol) would be a very bad world for blogs. A world without blogs would be...well, I'll let you make your own judgement call about that. Thanks for reading and subscribing to this blog though!

RSS Brings Podcasts to Life

By the same logic, without RSS it would hardly be viable to publish a podcast. That may be even more true about podcasts than it is about blogs. RSS subscription is the only thing separating podcasts from total obscurity. You can't tell that to all the millions of dogs around the world that get walked while their people listen to podcasts though. For those dogs, RSS is a miracle.

What are your favorite podcasts? Mine are the Gillmor Gang, IT Conversations and Democracy Now. If you like listening to podcasts - ask yourself, would you want to go to each show's website, see if there's a new episode available and then download it each time you wanted to listen to a podcast? No, you wouldn't.

If any of my favorite podcasts went off the air, I'd suffer serious emotional and occupational distress. If it weren't for RSS - all podcasts would go off the air because almost no one would listen to them.

Other Ways RSS Has Changed My Life

• RSS lets me, and more than 100 other people subscribed, monitor changes on a wiki I helped the Committee to Protect Bloggers set up called BlogSafer.org, where bloggers living under repressive political regimes can read in six different languages about the current best practices for blogging anonymously.
• RSS (scraped in this case) lets me put a box like the one on the right on my personal blog, so my readers and I can keep up with the latest posts from bloggers fighting repression against monks and their allies in Burma. You can add a box just like that to your site using the following code:

  <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/lone_remaining_burmese_blogger.php">News from Burmese blogger "Niknayman"</a><iframe style="margin: 10px; padding: 10px; float: left" src="http://www3.cbox.ws/box/?boxid=2755894&boxtag=9348&sec=main" marginheight="2" marginwidth="10" allowtransparency="yes" name="cboxmain" align="left" hspace="20px" vspace="20px" style="border: 1px solid rgb(72, 81, 90);" id="cboxmain" frameborder="0" height="305" scrolling="auto" width="160"></iframe>

  Thanks RSS!

• RSS helps me keep in touch with all kinds of information while I'm roaming around town, thanks to Netvibes Mobile.
• RSS gives me writing fodder here at RWW and lets me keep track of new developments on hundreds of company blogs, with ease. (Companies, send your feed to tips@readwriteweb.com please!)
• RSS lets me subscribe to searches, it lets me post shared items to my blog from inside my social bookmarking service and it lets me find out what just the most popular items from blogs I like are.

Here at RWW we've written about Ways to Filter RSS Feeds, we wrote about the RSS highlights in the year 2007 - we use, write about and think about RSS all the time. (If you want a look at a real far out use of RSS, here's a post I made on my personal blog today about a very complex use case.)

Does the US President Read RSS Feeds?

The current US President may be just getting comfortable with "the Google" but you can be sure he's got advisors that are subscribed to plenty of feeds. Right? Here's the best thing Dave Winer wrote today:

Wouldn't it be great if Obama said, in one of his stump speeches today, that it's RSS Awareness Day and I just want y'all to know I'm aware of RSS and you should be too.

Wouldn't that be reassuring? Heck, the state of Washington has declared an official state holiday (in June) to celebrate RSS. The least the Presidential candidates can do is say they know what it is. They should share at least part of their OPML files (subscription lists) publicly! They should all be obligated to read an AideRSS-determined most popular items feed spliced together from the top 10 human rights organizations in each continent around the world, if you ask me. As if.

Give it a Try!

Three cheers for RSS! If you haven't read feeds before, or you if it's been a long time - then I'd encourage you to step right up and do so right here and now in the iframe below. It's totally private, no one will see your passwords or subscriptions - this is a little window into the very popular and relatively easy to use Google Reader embedded in this post.

Log-in if you need to and grab some subscriptions. You can type in any web page and Google Reader will discover its RSS feed if it has one. Subscribe to our feed, subscribe to http://BoingBoing.com, subscribe to http://TreeHugger.com or hell, subscribe to http://michellemalkin.com if you want your eyelashes burnt off. The point is that you can subscribe to them all and receive updates in one place, with ease.

Once you've done that for awhile - then you'll be ready to come back and read our post about making the most of your RSS feed reader. Knock yourself out and enjoy! Once you've given RSS a chance, you'll likely never want to go back. May your next year be rich in high quality feeds!

Image credits: Megaphone RSS picture is from enterpriserssdayofaction.wikispaces.com and the little guy sitting on the chair that looks like a loo is from FastIcon

The site has links to the same categories you would find on the main ReadBurner homepage, including "Popular Stories," "Upcoming Stories," and "Most Recent Stories."

The category you want to view can be selected by entering the corresponding number on your mobile phone's keypad. Also available are links to the ReadBurner blog and the mobilized version of Google Reader, so you can continue your mobile RSS consumption.

After selecting which category of stories you want to read, you are presented with a list of stories, which are also selected by entering a number on your keypad.

When reading the story, there are links to the originating blog, the people who shared the story, and, at the bottom, links to take to you the next post or previous post, back a page, or back to the main ReadBurner mobile homepage.

The posts are formatted well for the small screens, so reading through the news is easy to do.

In addition the standard mobile page (preview it here), there is also a version of the site designed specifically for iPhone users available from http://m.readburner.com/iphone. (Preview here)

ReadBurner mobile may even become your preferred mobile RSS source over Google Reader for two reasons: One, there is no sign-in process like with Google Reader, which requires the necessary step of entering in your Google account credentials in order to view your feeds. And two, you're guaranteed to only see the top news stories instead of whatever random selection is at the top of your hundreds of feeds at the moment.

ReadBurner mobile is a great new site, and its launch shows that the ReadBurner team isn't doing anything halfway when it comes to their new service. Clearly, they're here to compete and are aiming to become your preferred RSS aggregator.

The first thing you may notice when visiting the new ReadBurner web site is its new interface, designed by Gary Bacon of PixelTalent. Although they kept the same color scheme of blue and orange, the new site is brighter, and, as they said on their blog (where you can also view before and afters), it's "shinier", too.

Categories & Stats

The old site had categories at the top that included "Popular," "Upcoming," "Most Recent," "Popular this Week," and "Popular All time,", but the new site is aiming to be less cluttered. This version of ReadBurner is sticking to just "Popular," "Upcoming," and "Most Recent."

Beneath these main categories, stories are also analyzed and sorted into sub-categories, each with their own RSS feed. Currently, these sub-categories include "Web," "Desktop," "Mobile," and "Apple," as well as "All," which will revert you to seeing all the shared items in whichever main category you are viewing.

ReadBurner

For viewing items that have been popular over the past week, there is a box on the right called "Popular This Week." Above the box, you'll notice a link to the "Stats" page, which is sort of like a cross between AllTop and the Techmeme Leaderboard, but focused on sharing data. Also on this page are the top 50 sources for shares.

This Week's Popular Items

Changes to the Shared Items

A feature called "Related Items" groups similar stories together, displaying the related content both on the main page as well as on the individual story's page itself, something which can be accessed by clicking on the button displaying the number of shares for that story.

What's even more exciting is that ReadBurner is working on a way to allow comments on the feeds without removing that conversation from the blogosphere, a hot button issue as of late. To do so, ReadBurner is working with Disqus, a new blog commenting system that many people are using on their blogs today. While the feature is not fully live yet, they are hoping to post ReadBurner comments on the originating source (the blog), in addition to their site. They believe this feature will be functional within a few weeks, but that will depend on Disqus. Although non-Disqus enabled blogs won't benefit, it's a good first step to limiting the conversation fragmentation issues while also adding a feature many have wanted.

The Disqus integration will also be tweaked in the future so that all related stories will share one set of comments - an interesting plan which will make blog reading and commenting a more conversational and intertwined experience.

Google Reader Integration

To make ReadBurner even more useful, they've integrated Google Reader within the web site. By clicking on the Google Reader tab, your Google Reader will appear right in the ReadBurner interface, something which makes feed reading and sharing even more enjoyable than before.

Other New Features

Another useful feature is ReadBurner's descriptive URLs. This allows you to view all the shared items by a particular author or a favorite sources from one easy-to-remember URL. For example, all stories from Read Write Web can be viewed at readburner.com/source/readwriteweb. To view stories by a particular author, the format is readburner.com/author/author. For example, all stories by Marshall are available at readburner.com/author/Marshall+Kirkpatrick.

Future Plans

Besides getting the Disqus integration perfected, the ReadBurner team will also be working on continually improving their algorithm as well as offering new ways for developers to utilize their data.

For users, the focus will be on data portability - that is, letting users take their ReadBurner data with them to other services (perhaps FriendFeed, we hope?) Additionally, users will be able to share more information about themselves, something that points to, perhaps, the creation of user profiles on the site.

Where Does This Leave RSSMeme?

ReadBurner's launch and extensive features list definitely brings some new competition to the other Google Reader Shared Items aggregator, RSSMeme. However, that site, which served us well in ReadBurner's absence, does offer one big feature that ReadBurner currently lacks: search. The search box on RSSMeme lets you search both stories and users, and seems a critical omission from the new ReadBurner.

RSSMeme also allows you to click "Read More of this Story," which expands the selection to show you more of the blog post while staying on the RSSMeme web site. A similar feature on ReadBurner actually takes you to the blog's web site instead. While this may not be a favorite feature for ReadBurner users, the bloggers who rely on pageviews will be sure to appreciate it.

Like ReadBurner, RSSMeme also gathers similar stories which can be accessed by a link from the main item. As far as whose algorithm for related items is better, only time will tell, but this could be a real source of competition between the two very similar sites. Another point of contention will certainly involve the speed of each site's algorithm in calculating the number of shares from Google Reader.

RSSMeme offers commenting via Disqus and, for its users, although it does not push comments back to the blogs like ReadBurner plans to do. RSSMeme also has a blog widget which shows the number of shares for each post, a small feature that many bloggers currently enjoy using.

Get Involved

If your Google Reader Shared Items feed was previously registered with the old ReadBurner, you don't need to add it again. They've also included the feeds of the people that requested to be added from the "Coming Soon" page that they had up for a while.

However, if you aren't sure, or if you never added your feed to begin with, you can easily do so from the "Add Feed" page.

We're very excited for ReadBurner's launch. It looks like they've done a good job overhauling the prior site while also offering many features that will offer RSSMeme some good competition. We're looking forward to what they will have in store for us in the future, too.

Web Apps

Google App Engine: History's Next Step or Monopolistic Boondoggle?

The big news this week was the launch of Google App Engine, "a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure." This will allow startups to use Google's web servers, APIs, and other developer tools to build a web app on top of. Google clearly has the scale and smarts to provide this platform service to developers. However, it begs the question: why would a startup want to hand over that much control and dependence to a big Internet company? Check out Marshall's analysis.

A new feature at ReadWriteWeb is an interactive game helping you to understand and contextualize web tech news in a fun way. This week we posted, via a new app from Impact Games, an interactive game that will let you model Google App Engine's impact in the marketplace. You can play the game here.

Our other coverage: Google App Engine: Cloud Control to Major Tom; HuddleChat: Did Google Just Rip Off 37Signals? and Google Takes Down HuddleChat After Complaints About 37Signals Ripoff

Related: Red Dog: Microsoft's Answer to App Engine and AWS?

How to Get Customer Service via Twitter

There has been a lot of talk lately of companies monitoring social media, be it Twitter, blogs, or social networking sites, for mentions of their company name and responding to customer service issues. Some of this interaction has been in the Twitter community, with Comcast being one of the more active participants as of late. Although in some cases, customers twittered their frustration after failing to receive the support they needed through traditional methods, in many cases, Twitter was the first place the customers vented their frustration, and then were surprised when they received a response from a support rep or company spokesperson.

Related: 5 Ways to Find More Friends on Twitter and Twittermethis Is A Brilliant Marketing Experiment

Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader

RSS is a big deal, as anyone who's subscribed to even a few feeds probably knows. Once you get past just a few feeds, though, it can quickly get overwhelming. RSS can leave you feeling inadequate, brain-dead and uninspired. Trying out new things will help you discover new, magical experiences, though. Letting go of the stress caused by any obligation to read everything will go a long way.

Here are seven tips for making the most of your RSS reader, from simple to more complex.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

How Important is Offline Access, Anyway?

In today's world, you're never too far from an internet connection. In developed countries, broadband access is available in more places than ever, and even poorer countries have internet cafes sprouting up left and right. Modern web workers and business travelers even take extra precautions to maintain always-on connectivity - packing air cards in their laptop bags or buying laptops that already have built-in EVDO access.

Despite the broad availability of internet access, it's the dead spots that have been pushing forward the need for offline access to web apps. For how can a web office suite like Google Docs or Zoho compete with desktop software if they become unusable when the internet connection disappears?

Why We Need Web Apps on the Desktop

Sarah Perez conclued in the above post that offline access is important now, but not as important as it once was. And that with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, it is growing less important every day. However Josh Catone thinks there is an important distinction to be made between offline access to web apps (as Google Gears provides) and desktop access to web apps (as Mozilla's Prism and Adobe's AIR provide). The latter is a very important step in the evolution of web apps.

Where to Find Open Data on the Web

This week there was a story on Techmeme entitled "We Need a Wikipedia for data". The article, written by X-Googler Bret Taylor, discussed the difficulty of finding open data sets on the internet, something which could spur innovation, allowing programmers to build new applications the likes of which have never been seen before. What was interesting about this story, in addition to, obviously, the concept of a Data Wiki itself, was the amazing and insightful commentary around this concept, not just on the blog, but all over the net, something which led to the discovery of some pretty good data sources that are already available.

A Guide to Business Development 2.0

At least once each day I get a call from someone trying to sell me outsourced development services. It's difficult to not be frustrated with these calls and it is increasingly hard to be polite, because they come so frequently. Yet, more than frustrated, I am just puzzled. Does this tactic still work? Who in this day and age would give business based on a cold call? These companies could definitely use a dose of business development 2.0.

Related: Marketing 2.0: Can Meebo Make it Real?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

I was feeling frustrated yesterday when switching from one feed reader to another on a new computer. Then I remembered how wonderful RSS really is - and I decided to write this post. I hope you'll find it interesting and useful.

1. Oversubscribe

The world of the web is a raging river; any fear you have of sticking your toe in a big, fast current is no reason to spend all your time in a tiny stream instead, in hopes perhaps that you can drink all the water.

I don't know why people feel obligated to read every item in every feed they've subscribed to. Get over that and you'll already be a far happier person. Many people say they find relief knowing that with enough subscriptions, anything important that they missed will come up again later. Other people oversubscribe and then just read "watchlists" - searches for keywords inside their subscribed feeds. Some feed readers make this easy.

2. Try a River of News View

Some feed readers require that you click through all of one feed's items at a time. Others allow you to see whatever individual items are most recent, regardless of what source feed they came from. This is the prefered method of most news bloggers - but it could serve you well too.

There's no way to read every item in every feed you've subscribed to, so after reading what's most important - try switching to what's most recent!

Try reading those items in order of appearance, until you don't want to read them any more. Then stop. Maybe mark all as ready, maybe don't worry about it. Life's too short to worry about it, aren't you glad you read what you were able to find the time to read?

3. Use Multiple Services

Some feeds are really important and are best read outside of the bulky environment of a feed reader. Try starting a Netvibes, Pageflakes or iGoogle page for the feeds you want to be able to quickly check out throughout the day. Drag the link from your address bar to your browser's toolbar and shapow - you've got a one-click way to check a handful of your most important feeds for updates.

If you haven't used one of these services before, here's a link to try out a Netvibes page I created to display some top sources in the Open Data movement.

4. Try Out a Desktop Reader

By most indications, Google Reader is the most popular RSS reader on the market and Bloglines is a close second. There are many reasons to try out a desktop reader like NetNewsWire, FeedDemon or Vienna. The picture below is of the desktop reader I've been using lately, Attensa for Mac. It's not as functional as NetNewsWire, and it's not as pretty as NewsFire, but it's quite stable. There are many, many different feed readers that do many different things. BlogBridge, for example, just released a feature that lets you filter between "positive" and "negative" articles by sentiment!

• Desktop readers are faster and more responsive. Almost everything you need is stored locally on your hard drive so it's faster than AJAX. Google Reader is nice and smooth but tends to time-out and freeze if you're subscribed to more than 1k feeds.
• Local storage of the articles in your feeds means you can access posts that are no longer online, you can see the difference between originally published and current versions and you can read your feeds if you're offline.

5. Tag Items to Share

Sharing items helps make your feed reading more meaningful and thus easier to do. If you know that people have subscribed to your shared items feed, then it makes even more sense to open up that feed reader and continue supplying the fruits of your good taste.

Google Reader has a popular shared-items feed, but it's not easy to control and if you stop using Google Reader then you lose your items and social connections. If instead you offer people a FeedBurner feed of shared items, you can plug any RSS feed in as the source for that feed. Bookmark items "toshare" in Del.icio.us and grab the RSS that tag in your account produces - publish that through Feedburner and you can know how many people have subscribed. Then, if you stop using del.icio.us and switch to Ma.gnolia - you can just change your source feed of shared items without changing the ultimate Feedburner feed and losing your subscribers.



Above is a shot of my blog and shared items feed, spliced together using a third party service called FeedDigest. Knowing that people want to read what I bookmark motivates me to read feeds and to open my bookmarking service.

6. Learn about OPML

OPML, or Outline Processor Markup Language, is a really simple file format that's the standard way to move bundles of RSS feeds around. If you use an RSS reader, you've already got an OPML file! Using OPML you can:

• Export your subscriptions from one feed reader in OPML format and import them into a different service in order to try out something new. Different feed readers are worth trying out as they can do different things. Some are good for a quick glance, others allow you to subscribe to password protected feeds (Google Reader does not!) and some you can use offline on a plane.
• You can swap full or partial reading lists with friends. ("I'll trade you my favorite sources on supply chain management for your favorite sources on CRM!" Oh yeah, fun times.)
• You can try to get an invite to the OPML sharing service Toluu (our coverage) or you can spend a day in Google Reader - both are great ways to use automatic recommendations to discover top new sources.
• You can send co-workers a collection of feeds for easy bulk import. I do this everywhere I work.
• If you work in PR, for example, you could send us (at tips@readwriteweb.com) the OPML file of all your clients' company RSS feeds. Would you please? (Don't know how? See this post with instructions.) A dirty little secret - at least some of us here read company blogs much more closely than we read press releases.

Want to try out an OPML file? Here's one: the RWW Best Feeds on Data Visualization, from our Toolkit for Key Issues of 2008. You can download the file and try importing it into your feed reader, or preview it live below using Grazr



Here's what the import/export screen looks like for Google Reader, it's under the settings tab.






7. Try Out Additional Services

The second best thing about RSS, after convenience, is its flexibility. There are so many different ways you can use RSS feeds. Here are a few of my favorites, try experimenting and you'll get more out of the medium.


• AideRSS is my favorite RSS tool right now, it filters any feed to determine what the most popular items in the feed are. You can then subscribe to just the 20% of posts in a feed with the most comments, inbound links, etc. I do this for feeds on many topics when I'm not invested enough to read every item - I just read what a blogger's readers thinks is most interesting.


• Social bookmarking tool Ma.gnolia makes it really easy to make friends with interests similar to your own, then to subscribe to a feed of all the things your friends bookmark. That's a high-quality feed to read.


• Email to RSS lets you keep track of certain types of emails in a different application. I know I get enough email that I need a reminder about some of it. I created a filter in GMail, where each filter/label has its own RSS feed. Just subscribe to this URL in your feed reader https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/label/ but replace the word label with the name of the label you want to subscribe to. If you've got a feed reader that supports authenticated, or password protected, feeds - then you can login once and it will display that email feed as RSS every time you load your reader. Google Reader doesn't support authenticated feeds, but Netvibes and the Newsgator readers do. In theory, our workplaces will someday publish loads of password protected feeds and this is how we'll read them. For now, there are some things it's nice to read in RSS instead of getting lost in the email inbox.


• We also like RSS tools like Dapper.net, Feed43, FeedRinse and Yahoo! Pipes around here - but there are so many more RSS tools available! Check out the most popular items tagged RSS in Del.icio.us - and consider subscribing to the feed from that page!
Above: From our post on mashing up lots of RSS services, How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet

Conclusion

It's easy to get discouraged with RSS. Trying out new things will help you discover new, magical experiences, though. Letting go of the stress caused by any obligation to read everything will go a long way.

Have a good time with this exciting medium and let us know in comments what your favorite methods for making the most of RSS are.

Little guy reading feeds icon at the top of this post from FastIcon

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tips_for_making_the_most_of_rss.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tips_for_making_the_most_of_rss.php RSS Aggregators Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:32:41 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Have you heard about Toluu yet? This new RSS-based service, currently in private beta, lets you share your OPML with others in order to discover new feeds, see what your friends are reading, and even discover new people who share your same interests. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because Toluu is very much like the reincarnation of the once-popular site, ShareYourOPML (now defunct), which used to do the same thing. But Toluu not only revives that site's spirit, it does so it a much better fashion than ShareYourOPML ever did.
]]>Sponsor

]]> Toluu is the latest newcomer to the RSS scene, joining a crowded space dominated by online readers and communities like Google Reader, Shyftr, Bloglines, and aggregators like RSSMeme, the soon-to-return Readburner, and the everything lifestream of FriendFeed. Unlike those sites, however, Toluu doesn't aim to take you away from your current RSS reader. Instead, what Toluu offers is a way to share your feeds with others in a quick and easy way.

So why does this feed sharing service have so many other bloggers talking? And why should you bother with yet another RSS service? Here are 10 good reasons why you should give Toluu a look:

1. You can sign up with OpenID: Toluu starts out on the right foot by letting you sign up for the service with your OpenID. You can also choose to save yourself some typing by letting them import your profile using the hCard microformat on your profile at flickr, twitter, Technorati, Last.FM, or Upcoming. Not into OpenID yet? A regular sign-up form is still provided.
2. It's Easy: There's not a whole lot to it. Sign up, login, and upload your OPML. You don't have to find your friends or fill out a big user profile.
3. You don't have to do anything: Besides uploading your OPML, there isn't anything else you have to do to benefit from the service. Although you can go through your feeds and mark your favorites, those of us with hundreds of feeds won't take the time and we don't have to. Toluu can make recommendations based on your feed list alone.
4. Collaborative filtering helps Toluu learn: As activity on Toluu increases, what you and your friends read and tag as favorites will help you discover new feeds that you may enjoy reading. The recommendation engine is right on target. It shows your matches, what percentage compatibility you have with them, what feeds you have in common, and which ones you like. This is much better than anything ShareYourOPML ever offered.
5. You won't be recommended "one-hit wonder" blogs: Remember that one guy who wrote that one post that one time? The one that hit Techmeme and then you never heard of him since? That feed wouldn't be recommended to you, unless you showed interest in actively reading the rest of his feed on a regular basis.
6. The Toluu bookmarklet helps you add new feeds with ease: Because re-importing your OPML after ever new feed added would be a pain, Toluu offers a bookmarklet that lets you add a feed to both Toluu and your preferred feed reader which will first add the feed to Toluu before continuing on to add it to your RSS reader.
7. It's not trying to replace your RSS Reader: If you wanted to, you could use it as an RSS reader, but that's not what it's designed to do. So it's not a matter of you having to switch readers to enjoy using this service.
8. The Feeds! No matter how many feeds you currently subscribe to, you're bound to find more that you didn't know existed. Plus, you can spy on the shared feeds of anyone, provided you know their username, which is a great way to find out what people read.
9. The Activity Stream: The Toluu activity page gives you a quick glance at what your friends have been reading and doing on the Toluu service.
10. The Potential: Granted, this, like most services today rely on having a decent userbase to find success. However, based on ShareYourOPML's former popularity, Toluu has a great shot at filling the void that was left behind when that site disappeared.

A Toluu Profile Page

All that being said, the site still needs a bit of work before it can really take off, but since it's still in private beta, they have the time to work out the kinks and maybe even add a couple more features, too.

For example, a search feature to find other Toluu users would be a big help, especially as they grow. Also, the notification preferences are all switched on by default, which means you'll get emails whenever someone adds you as a contact, adds or removes a feed, or recommends a feed, and you're automatically subscribed to the newsletter. That's a bit much.

If you're interested in joining Toluu, you can request a beta invite or you can comment here. I have seven to give away, so first come, first serve.

UPDATE! There are 100 invites available now. Comment here for yours!

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_reasons_why_youre_going_to_love_toluu.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_reasons_why_youre_going_to_love_toluu.php Products Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:08:45 -0800 Sarah Perez