ReadWriteWeb

Twitterfeed, the popular tool for publishing links automatically to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, has been acquired by URL shortener Bitly. Both are loosely associated projects of seed investor and web tech incubator Betaworks, part of what Betaworks CEO John Borthwick calls a "glorious connected ecosystem of things we have going on here."

For Twitterfeed to move in-house with the analytics provider that is the basis of so much of its value makes sense. Twitterfeed itself has steadily added features in recent months though, from geocoding published messages to publishing into LinkedIn. Is it a good idea to automate publishing of links into social networks? The jury is still out on that one.

Publishing service Twitterfeed announced this week that it has partnered with UK startup SkimLinks to offer publishers an option to automatically turn product links and references on blogs into affiliate sales links. Twitterfeed automates the publishing of blog feeds into Twitter and Facebook.

SkimLinks over-writes links to products with affiliate links to any of several thousand vendors, and typically takes 25% of the affiliate revenue resulting from purchases originating on a publisher's site. Publishers retain 75% of revenue in exchange for producing the content and providing distribution.

A storm of news points to a future of frictionless publishing and subscription, across platforms.

Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you're among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days.

What does your blog have in common with CNN, the Wall St. Journal and the White House? You probably publish your updates to Twitter using Twitterfeed, just like those organizations do. Starting today if you publish on Blogger, Typepad or another publishing system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds Twitterfeed will subscribe and push your new posts to Twitter in a matter of moments.

That's not the only change going live, either. Publishing to Facebook? Check. An improved queue management system for greater reliability? Check. Integration with Google Analytics? Check!

You may not believe this, but there are actually people on Twitter who don't have blogs, use bookmarking services, or contribute to review sites. Don't judge. Maybe they're busy, or bucking peer pressure, or their repressive government or pseudo-Amish lifestyle makes juggling multiple profiles inconvenient. Regardless of the reason, there are just some people who only use Twitter and email to communicate. And when these individuals are ready to share more than the standard 140 characters with the Twitterverse, they've got a few different tools to choose from.

RSS and syndication are the veins that the new social web flows through. Countless products and services have been built on top of RSS in the past few years but there are always a few that stand above the rest.

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.