ReadWriteWeb

The newest release of the Feedly reader version may be one of the essential reading applications you can have for any of your devices. It is the power reader's reader and available today on any Android or iOS device you can find.

Feedly has been around for a while. As a browser extension to Chrome and Firefox, Feedly has been taking RSS feeds and Google Reader and turning them into a smart magazine start page since 2008. It made things simple and elegant and easy to navigate. The new mobile version of the mobile application attempts to bring that same functionality to your devices.

Feed reading on the go is an unsolved problem, none of the available options really feels like they've nailed it yet. Feedly, the popular browser plug-in that turns your Google Reader subscriptions into an attractive magazine-style display, has just released an iPhone app that may be my favorite mobile feed reader I've tried. (iTunes link) When I've got free time and am looking for something good to read, I've been launching Feedly for the past few months that I've been testing it.

The app, which sells for $2.99, offers an attractive folder-based navigation that's easy to thumb through horizontally. Sharing, bookmarking, Tweeting and emailing are all very easy to do. There's no limit to the number of feeds you can subscribe to in the app. It uses a popularity metric to surface key items in each folder of subscriptions that you should read if in a time crunch. It's a great little app and well worth a few dollars.

Last week we reported on the demotion of the link to Google Reader below the "more" fold inside Gmail, asking whether it was part of a general trend away from enthusiasm about RSS. That made me very sad, because it decreased the likelihood of casual discovery of this fabulous technology. Now it turns out that Google says (via Twitter, not on its blog or feed!) that the move was a mistake and will be returned soon, possibly as early as today.

Alexia Tsotsis wrote last night that the company determines the placement of services in the toolbar by popularity, and the Picasa photo sharing service was correctly added, but according to a Google representative it should have been in addition to and not instead of Reader. In celebration of the good news, perhaps we should all send the following video, Common Craft's intro to RSS, to a friend in need of a life changing web technology. It's easy to be snarky about peoples' supposed over-reaction to the demotion of a link, it's another matter to recognize a valuable tool and share it with others.

Google has quietly moved the link to access Google Reader, its online RSS reader service, below the top level navigation fold for Gmail users. Some Google Reader users are complaining about the move as an inconvenience, but the biggest loss will be to those users who have yet to start using Reader.

The Picasa photo service has replaced Reader in navigation bar. Reader is now the first option that appears when a user clicks "more." While this will likely decrease the frequency with which new users discover the magic that is RSS, it's probably also a recognition that the service isn't being used as enthusiastically as anyone had hoped. It may also be related to the fact that Picasa generates revenue for Google and Reader does not.

Dave Winer, a man who was key to the creation and growth of blogging, RSS, podcasting, OPML and several more technical standards that helped social media become what it is today, announced this morning that he's working on a new technology, a simple blogging tool that keeps an archival copy of your content on your servers, but pushes it out onto whatever other publishing platform you choose, whether that be Tumblr, Twitter or "whatever new corporate blogging silo is popular next year or the year after."

"The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure," Winer wrote in a blog post today. "You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place." This is very good news. It appears that the tool will live first at My.ReallySimple.org (password protected).

Looking for a quick and easy way to get an app into the Android Market, but don't have the time, skills, or money to develop one? Feed.nu can help.

The site offers a way for you to make your own app, ready for the Market, in just a few minutes. Once you sign up for a Feed.nu account and upload your feed info, you're able to download a .apk that you can, in turn, upload to the Android Market.

"RSS is Dead", tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that's not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.

If you're not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you've subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.

The Wikileaks story has just begun, with just over one half of one percent of all the diplomatic cables in the organization's possession having been posted online. Already, a steady flow of scandal and questionable secrets has been unveiled - but it's quickly become too overwhelming for most of us to follow.

Where can we find the best coverage from the journalists that are focusing on summarizing all this information? This week blogging and syndication trailblazer Dave Winer has launched a simple but invaluable service that centralizes all the coverage from all the major media outlets analyzing the Wikileaks cables. Called Wikiriver, the project is a great example of RSS and OPML put in service of our collective interests. Want to catch up with the list of important stories unearthed so far? Check out the Guardian's day-by-day summary; I found it on Wikiriver.

Facebook is experimenting with a new way to filter the Newsfeed: by media type (like photos, links or games), page updates only or by friend list. Unearthed by Josh Constine at watchdog blog Inside Facebook, these new options look great.

Constine argues the new options and their prominent placement "can make consuming the feed less exhausting, and lead to greater engagement, more Likes and Comments, and more time spent on Facebook." I agree. These new options are a form of allowing the all-important Newsfeed to be filtered by context, lending it a greater feeling of control and cohesiveness. The current design prompts users to view updates in time-based order only, but sometimes you want to view a certain type of update or updates from certain groups of your social contacts. Screenshot below.

Couchpubtato brings together PubSubHubbub and CouchDB, giving you the ability to turn your feeds into real-time streams and then make any Couch database act as a subscriber endpoint.

Couchpubtato converts incoming XML RSS and ATOM feed data into JSON Activity Streams format. Here's an example: