Websites get shut down all the time. Sometimes, nobody notices. Other times, what remains of the service's community lets out one last collective cry of disapproval and then moves on with their collective lives. Last night, a certain segment of the Web's population went into a hysterical fit of rage as Google announced it was shuttering Reader, its eight-year old RSS feed reading service. 

I have to admit, I was pretty upset as well, even though I knew this day was coming since Google started lopping off the otherwise-neglected Reader's most-useful functionality in 2011. Like a lot of people, I use Google Reader constantly. It helps me do my job in a way that no purported alternative has managed to.    

(See also: Sudden Site Shutdowns And The Perils Of Living Our Lives Online.)

Reader may not have been a billion-dollar business for Google, but for the dedicated community of users addictively affixed to it everyday, Google Reader was a mainstay in our browser tabs. Like email, Twitter and a select few favorite sites, Reader stayed open all day. On July 1, it will close forever.

Ouch, Google. This One's Personal. 

Google Reader felt very personal to its users. Lots of people have spent substantial amounts of time everyday with Google Reader for many years, having hand-curated our feeds to reflect our news diets, tastes and interests. Many hardcore users can boast hundreds of thousands of read items. 

When people use a Web-based service so heavily for so many years, they take its presence for granted. Of course Google Reader is there. When we open a new tab and tell our browsers to go there, the interface will load and there will be new things to read. It doesn't even cross our minds (even if it should) that Reader will one day disappear. We don't think about the contents of these browser tabs from a CEO's perspective. We're just users. Over time, the places we go on the Internet almost start to feel as much a part of our environment as our physical surroundings. 

That's why, when faced with the prospect of such a service going away, people freak out. For those who rely on it the most, especially for professional purposes, the feeling is especially unsettling. 

RSS Isn't Just For Tech People

Drew Olanoff wrote a smart post about the failure of RSS to gain widespread adoption, thus cementing Reader's place in the graveyard of Web services. He's got a point. RSS is not something I could easily explain to my mother. Over the years, I've had the "Oh, do you know about Google Reader?" conversation with many people, to whom I then evangelized about the usefulness of RSS and subscribing to feeds. Most of them never showed up in my "Friends" list on Reader. It just wasn't for them. 

But it's not just for tech enthusiasts, either. This is the first time a service has shut down and I've received tweets, texts and emails from friends freaking out, wondering what they're going to do. These are not Hacker News-reading uber-geeks or even people who follow technology news much at all. They're journalists, bloggers, scientists, artists and people who prefer to follow local news and blogs via feeds. It's a nerdy set, yes, but most of this particular sample of people don't care all that much about tech. Yet I've never seen them so upset. 

Those same people are now scrambling for an alternative service. None of them, incidentally, are using Google+. At all. 

No Business Model? Google Never Gave It A Chance

Google brought in $50 billion last year. I don't know how much it costs to run Google Reader (which I'm sure is not trivial), but how much of a dent could its continued operation possibly have been making in Google's bottom line? 

More importantly, why did Google never even try to make make money from those hyper-attentive eyeballs? Immediately after the shutdown was announced, Dave Winer chastised Google Reader users by saying "Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on." 

The thing is, Reader users were never asked to "pay a fair price." The service was as free as the rest of Google's many consumer products and I, for one never saw even the tiniest, most subtle advertisement appear.  Indeed, as Reader creator Chris Wetherell told Om Malik,  “Monetization abilities were never tried” within Reader, which reportedly "never went past the experimental phase" and didn't have much support within the company. 

That's too bad. Google makes most of its money from understanding its users intent and interests. Its search algorithm does a remarkable job at ascertaining those things, but each query requires some degree of guesswork. Reader users were explicitly declaring the things they were interested in, through subscribing to feeds, clicking headlines, sharing content and tapping the star button. We were just handing it data, all day long. Of course, the revenue potential would only grow as Google put more effort into iterating and marketing Reader, which it scarcely did. Along the way, it could have offered targeted perks to publishers, many of whom would gladly pay for any chance to stand out in a crowded online news ecosystem.

If it had been steadily improved and monetized, Google Reader could have been a pretty valuable service. Instead, it was ignored. You can't blame its users for that.  

Can We Trust Google?  

There's something unnerving about a service you use every day disappearing, even if the decision has perfectly sound business rationale behind it. It reminds us that the Web isn't ours and that the existence of these products is totally dependent on the whim of some corporation, which can pull the plug at any time. We have no say in the matter.

Shutdowns like this force people to reevaluate their relationship with their favorite places on the Web. It makes those relationships feel less secure. And as Techdirt wisely points out, it should make us all wary of relying to heavily on a single provider for our online existence. 

It makes us wonder: if five years down the road Google decides that Gmail isn't making enough money, will they kill that too? Probably not. What about Google Calendar? What will be on the "spring cleaning" list in 2017? We have no way of knowing.  

User trust is an incredibly important commodity for Google. They need it if we're going to let them track our browsing habits and host our email. And they're certainly going to need it if we're going to let them drive our cars and build computers to wear on our faces. 

Things like this make Google look less humane, less compassionate. It might not have been huge, but there was a very dedicated community of users on Google Reader. Shutting the lights out on all those people, even if they do have viable alternatives, just makes it feel like Google doesn't give a damn. It seems arrogant. 

The Bright Side To Google Reader's Death 

There are plenty of other reasons for the Google Reader shutdown outrage. For many publishers, it drives far more traffic than Google+, the social network Google desperately wants normal people to use. It could even make life harder for Iranians, who use it to bypass government censorship.  A big part of the reason Reader has that advantage is because it lives on Google's servers, which are harder to censor (although it does happen). 

But once the blind fury and tears of agony subside, most level-headed users will be able to see the upside here. As Marco Arment points out, the death of Reader is going to lead to innovation in a space that hasn't seen it in years. 

What's beautiful about RSS is exactly why great alternatives will emerge—in fact, already have. RSS reading isn't Google's to kill.

— Zach Seward (@zseward) March 13, 2013

In fact, we're likely to end up with products that are even better than Google Reader, which was clearly being neglected for a long time. In the meantime, players like Feedly, Flipboard and Reeder are promising not to let the death of Reader won't mean the end of feed-reading within those services. Feedly, in particular, is building a Google Reader clone that promises to replace the original seamlessly. 

Whatever crops up may not have the advantage of living on Google's massive and speedy infrastructure, but we're likely to get some well-designed, highly functional apps with which to fill Reader's void. They just better have an export button. 

In order to make a single recommendation that will be useful to as many people as possible, we applied the following criteria:

1. Must be cross-platform, which at minimum means it works on both iOS and Android.
2. Should have granularity of control, meaning you can easily access all of your feeds and folders.
3. Even though Twitter and Facebook haven't usurped the RSS Reader, the modern mobile RSS Reader should integrate with the leading social services and help filter out their noise.
4. Must hook into Google Reader. Since Google Reader is the dominant desktop RSS Reader, it's therefore the most common place to subscribe to feeds. Google allows mobile apps to access Google Reader subscriptions and it's become an essential feature for a modern mobile RSS Reader.

With those criteria to guide us, there was one mobile RSS Reader that stood out...

Our Recommendation: Feedly

Feedly is basically a better user interface for your Google Reader feeds. After you input your Google Reader username and password, Feedly lists out your Google Reader folders and offers a slick, intuitive way to browse them.

In addition, Feedly gives you a nifty way to subscribe to topics - through its "Essentials," a curated list of popular topics like 'Cooking' and 'Design.'

For the river of news fans, Feedly has the option to view your feeds chronologically.

Feedly integrates with Twitter and other social media, allowing you to share your finds. It also enables you to browse your Tumblr subscriptions, which is a nice touch since RSS isn't the primary way to keep track of Tumblr blogs (Tumblr promotes its own internal "follow" subscription model).

Feedly is available on both iOS and Android, as well as being a browser plugin for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Feedly was ranked 4th in our list of the Top 10 Feed & RSS Technologies of 2011 - behind only Twitter and Facebook.

Spoiled For Choice: Other Recommendations

If you're looking for a mobile RSS Reader, we recommend you try Feedly first. That said, there are many different flavors of mobile RSS Readers and a lot of it will come down to your personal preferences. So if Feedly doesn't taste quite right to you, here are some alternatives that may satisfy your RSS appetite:

Pulse was named number 6 in our list of the Top 10 Mobile Products of 2011. The main reason was that Pulse is available over a range of platforms - more than Feedly, in fact. As Dan Rowinski noted, Pulse is "the only truly cross-platform reader that brings its full user interface, fully intact, to iOS, Android smartphones and tablets including the Barnes & Noble Nook and the Kindle Fire as well as Windows Phone 7." Pulse is a very colorful app and has similarities to Flipboard, so it may suit you if you prefer that magazine-like experience. Note that there is a limit to the number of feeds you can input into Pulse.

Reeder was popular in the informal poll I conducted on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. It's iOS only, so if you're an iPhone user then it may be a great option for you. Compared to Feedly and Pulse, Reeder is fairly vanilla and not very colorful. However it makes up for that with an easy-to-read interface and excellent integration with social media. Many people love Reeder (including our own Jon Mitchell), so give it a try if Feedly doesn't work out for you.

If you're an Android user, then Google Reader offers a popular app that connects very well with other Google products (like Google Reader and Google+). It's not available on iOS, however the mobile browser version of Google Reader is more than adequate - although Feedly, Reeder and other iOS apps offer a better user interface for Apple users.

Flipboard made its name as an iPad app and to this day it remains my favorite RSS Reader on that device. I also use it daily on smartphone too. It doesn't have all of my feeds, just my favorite folders in Google Reader. So it's more of a complement to Feedly, than a direct competitor. Flipboard recently became available on Android too.

Finally, if you want something a bit different, my6sense has taken a unique approach to filtering. It attempts to guess what you want to read, by automatically filtering your feeds.

We hope you find that one of these smartphone RSS Reader apps will suit your needs. Let us know in the comments what you think of our main pick, Feedly. Or if you have another personal favorite, tell us what's special about it.

In this post I identify two key trends in online reading over 2011, plus two main ways that our online reading habits have changed.

Twelve months ago, when reviewing online reading over 2010, I concluded that "consuming content has become a more social, mobile experience." In particular, I cited the growth of Facebook and Twitter as news consumption services. I also noted that mobile devices, like Android phones and the iPad, had become more widely used for reading. Thanks to Flipboard, Instapaper and other innovative reading apps. On the other hand, RSS Readers declined in importance over 2010.

Remember that the iPad only launched in April 2010 and Flipboard in July. So 2010 really was a turning point in online reading.

Two Key Online Reading Trends in 2011

1. Social networks are even more important now in finding news and articles to read.

Facebook and Twitter were joined this year by Google+, which has become particularly popular as a topic-based social network. Some would argue that Facebook has gone a step too far, with its controversial frictionless sharing features. Regardless, most people these days discover and consume news via the three big social networks.

2. Iterations in iPad and popular reading apps; along with increased competition in both tablet and reading app markets.

Apple released version 2 of the iPad in March. Competition increased though, with other tablet devices making an impact in 2011: such as the Android powered Samsung Galaxy, Motorola Xoom and Amazon's new Kindle Fire.

Last year's most popular reading apps, Flipboard and Instapaper, have also seen more competition in 2011. Apps like News 360, News.Me and Read It Later do much the same thing as the two originators, but have gathered strong fan bases of their own.

There has also been a lot of innovation in the type of content we're reading, for example Tumblr's curated experience and apps like The Atavist (which mixes multimedia and non-fiction storytelling).

How Our Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2011

1. It's much more mobile. Smartphones and tablets have improved during 2011; for example, the iPhone now has push notifications for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more. Also, as mentioned above, there is plenty more competition now among reading apps targeted to smartphones and tablets.

2. We not only read more, but discuss more, across a wider variety of platforms. Facebook has been the most aggressive social network in integrating news into its service. Media companies such as Washington Post and The Guardian have connected to Facebook so tightly that even the mere fact of clicking on a link to their site sends an update to your Facebook news feed (if you've approved the so-called "frictionless sharing" for their app). That's led to more discussion of news on Facebook. Twitter and Google+ have also become key platforms on which to engage in conversation about news.

Meanwhile media sites and professional blogs have countered by going the other way - they've extended their brands to the large social networks, as well as niche ones. For example at ReadWriteWeb we have brand Pages on Facebook and Google+, an official Twitter account with over 1 million followers, and we keep a close eye on and engage in tech communities like Hacker News, Reddit and Digg. Social network activity has increased significantly for us, compared to 2010.

For the consumer, the upshot is that you have more places to read and discuss the latest news of the day or topical articles of interest to you.

How Has Online Reading Changed For You?

Recently we listed the morning routines of the ReadWriteWeb staff. Given our occupations, invariably reading is one of the first activities each of us does. Joe Brockmeier admitted that he "taps into Google Reader and Twitter before even getting out from under the blankets." Jon Mitchell waits for Twitter push notifications on his iPhone while he brushes his teeth.

As for me, I kick off the day by checking over ReadWriteWeb.com. Next up is email and then the social trio: Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Then I look over RSS feeds using Google Reader and Flipboard. Finally, I check industry specific news aggregators Techmeme and Mediagazer.

Just as important as what I check is what I check it on. I read online more frequently than ever - on computer (in the office or out and about, e.g. in cafes), iPad (when in the lounge or in bed), iPhone (just about everywhere).

So while there are identifiable trends in online reading habits in 2011 (more mobile, more social networking than ever), everyone has a different routine. How has online reading changed or evolved for you over 2011?

That is where RSS applications designed specifically for Android become incredibly useful and powerful tools. Available through the Android Market, there are a plethora of terrific RSS readers that will render users' favorite sites into delightful, visually appealing feeds. What are the best Android RSS readers in the Market? Let's take a look.

Pulse

When it comes to intuitive design and well-crafted user experience, Pulse is at the top of the Android RSS ecosystem. Pulse allows for a user to set up rows of publications that are easily scrollable from right to left with a flick of a finger. One of the newest updates to Pulse institutes pages within the app that allows for customization of topics. Do you like a lot of tech news? Page 1 can be your tech home page. If you like sports or politics or business, Pages 2, 3 and 4 can be set up for any topic you can think of. Pulse is fully social-enabled, allowing users to tweet, email or recommend stories right from the app. Use Pulse in landscape mode for the best use of screen space.

Feedly

In terms of visually appealing, customizable RSS readers, Feedly is the father of third-party RSS readers. It has made a grand transition from the Web browser to mobile, offering a user interface that is easy to use and packed with content. Users can import their Google Reader feeds or sign up for RSS feeds on the Web and have them be imported to the app. Feedly's color scheme is also customizable from either a white background with black text or a black background with white text, good for those who prefer a darker interface.

Google Reader

Google Reader is the original, ubiquitous Web-based RSS reader. It has always been more functional than flashy (the way Google has always made their products). Google Reader on Android is no different. If a user has a robust list of RSS feeds in their Google Reader and does not feel like going through the hassle of reconfiguring a new application with all their favorite publications, Google Reader is the way to go. Since it is Android, the smartphone knows automatically what the users' Google account name and login are, so installation is as easy as allowing the app to access their Google account. Just like in the browser, Google Reader allows users to star items, see the people you follow and explore articles from sources you may not be following.

NewsRob

NewsRob is a geared to the power user who wants a little bit more functionality than the normal Google Reader. It works on a freemium model - the free bare bones version of the app encourages the user to buy the paid version ($5.78 currently in the Android Market). The free version is relatively sparse. It allows for a user to import reader feeds from Google Reader and set up new feeds either by entering the URL of the feed or searching by keyword. The paid model allows for comments and third-party content to be seen in the app, functionalities that are uncommon in a typical news reader.

Find Topic-Related RSS Apps

In the view of many, the simpler the RSS reader is, the better if functions and the more users want to come back. The Android Market is full of pre-populated RSS readers for a variety of topics - tech, politics, cooking etc. One of my favorite is called "Simple Tech News" and is a list of RSS feeds from the top tech blogs.

Any self-respecting publisher has an app in the Android Market. A lot of them amount to mobile versions of their websites in the form of RSS feeds and work better than visiting the site through the mobile browser. Want to access all of CNN's published content? Or maybe you like conservative politics and want to check out Political Fizz. Essentially, if there is an RSS feed for your favorite website, there is a good chance that some developer has figured a way to stick it into and Android applications, either for a dedicated publisher or through customizable applications.

Of course, the resulting list is a lot of self-serving posts from startups hoping to cash in on Scoble's influence, but frankly, I don't care. I'm obsessed with this thread and the startups that keep appearing there, minute by minute. It's startup Disneyland! And if you're an early adopter itching to try new services, you should check it out, too.

According to Scoble's post, he's having lunch with Ashton Kutcher on June 17. And to stoke the fires of the eager founders, he writes:

"Last year when I had lunch with him he invested in Flipboard, which went onto be Apple's favorite iPad app of the year. Got something you want to get in front of him? This is your shot. Stealth startups preferred."

Well, that's one way to unveil the stealthy startups in hiding!

At present, the answer summary includes the following:

• Appysnap! - www.appysnap.com
• CollabraCam - world's first multi-camera video production iPhone app with live editing and director-to-camera communication, www.collabracam.com
• Cursor - www.ThinkCursor.com (and the first Cursor community, www.RedLemona.de)
• Filmaster - the ultimate video recommendation engine for new releases (local theatres, TV, VOD), www.filmaster.com
• PlayMySong - iPod app, www.playmysong.net
• Semiautomatic Semiotics - 3-d immersive bicycling, http://semiautomatic3d.com
• Spot for iPhone - Instapaper for Places, www.spot-app.com
• turntable.fm
• Virlnet - Virlnet allows businesses to reward the grassroots efforts of social network users for promoting their brand, www.virlnet.com
• Wanderfly - www.wanderfly.com - travel recommendation engine
• Zaarly
• Zferral - www.zferral.com
• Zipongo - diet and exercise tracking, www.zipongo.com

But this summary is incomplete. There are now 42 answers on this post and counting. I want to try them all! And if you're also dying to test out (or at least sign up for) some new services, stealthy and otherwise, this is one thread you should follow. Be warned, though: Quora is often labelled a "time sucking" service, and this thread is a prime example as to why. Be sure to have a few minutes to spare before clicking through!

Also, Quora? Please unblock my IP.

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.

Twitter Kills RSS

According to Stay's earlier post, Twitter has been moving away from RSS for some time. Last year, Twitter developer Isaac Hepworth told Stay that only hyperlinks to RSS feeds were being removed from Twitter profile pages, but links to the RSS in the Twitter metadata would remain. Their temporary removed was "accidental," Hepworth had said, and would be fixed soon.

But Stay says the problem was never fixed, and he could not find any evidence of RSS in the HTML source, either. This lead him to conclude that Twitter had indeed killed off all support for the technology. An article in Twitter's Help section confirmed this, saying: "we no longer directly support RSS feeds on Twitter."

As Stay noted at the time, developers could access RSS through Twitter's API, which may be the last recourse for getting an RSS feed from Twitter's website, outside of third-party services.

Twitter API 2 RSS

Now another developer, Shawn McCollum, has done just that. Twitter API 2 RSS, available as a code snippet (aka a "gist" on GitHub), is now ready for testing, he says. The code was originally written for personal use when he wanted to build his own better-looking and more functional RSS feeds for Twitter profiles.

After McCollum heard that Twitter was removing RSS support, he realized that the same code could be retooled for use by others. The only problem now is that he does not know how to get past Twitter's API limit of 150 calls per hour from a single IP address. He's looking for ideas to help with that, if you want to pitch in.

In the meantime, technical users can host their own copy of Twitter API 2 RSS and then subscribe to the resulting feeds in Google Reader or any other RSS reader application. However, the code is not yet available as a service for end users at this time. Details on how to use the code are available here on McCollum's blog.

Here's what it looks like, in action:

RSS dead? Hardly.

Of course, Flipboard is not the first startup to display RSS feeds in a more attractive visual layout. A number of startups have done the same, including Feedly, Pulse and Zite, to name just a few of the more recent entries. But Flipboard is one of the most popular social magazines for iPad at present, having just announced that it's now seeing more than 10 million "flips per day," up from 3 million just two months ago. (Flips equate to pageviews in the iPad application). It has also been featured in Apple's "App Essentials Hall of Fame" in iTunes and is one of the 25 most popular free apps for iPad.

Blekko, while perhaps a less well-known startup, is an alternative search engine that uses human editors to aid in the elimination of spam from search results. It also allows you to curate your own personalized, customized mini-search engines featuring content you curate yourself. (Note: We recently looked at this process in a post titled "How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job.")

Earlier this year, the startup announced that it's using Facebook "likes" to help create personalized search experiences, where users can see whether or not any of their Facebook friends liked particular search results. This is similar to the functionality Microsoft's Bing search engine just announced yesterday.

Within Flipboard, however, blekko is providing the social magazine with access to its RSS feeds via a specially developed API (application programming interface), which offers a programmatic way for Flipboard to access Blekko's content.

This isn't Flipboard's first RSS feed integration, either. In December, the magazine added support for Google Reader, but, of course, this assumed that an end user was already using RSS feeds and had a collection of feeds ready for import. With Blekko, users don't need to understand RSS technology, they only need to know what content they would like to see and perform a simple search.

The blekko integration is live now in Flipboard's iPad app.

Yesterday XYDO, the service that curates users' Twitter and Facebook streams and adds a layer of social bookmarking a la Reddit or Digg, opened up to the public. After trying it out for a little while today, I realized that something felt wrong, and then it came to me - when I click on a title, I don't get taken to the website hosting that content, I get taken to a page within XYDO that hosts the content.

It's like XYDO has taken my friends' recommendations, let people vote on them and then, right when I go to click on it, stepped in and said "Here, take this instead." But what exactly is wrong with this?

I exasperatedly brought this up with XYDO on Twitter earlier today, asking (perhaps a bit overboard) if the app "just steals content entirely," to which they replied that they only show "what publishers make available via their RSS feeds, be that an excerpt or full text."

When I pushed a bit further, asking why XYDO doesn't take the same route as Digg, Reddit or Google Fastflip and let the user vote but then take them to the originating site - so as to give that site the traffic - they responded that XYDO is "at its foundation [...] an RSS reader, like Google Reader" and that XYDO "handles content the same as Google Reader, Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, News.me, et al..."

Is there something wrong with all of these apps, then? Certainly not, if the publisher is willingly making their content available via and RSS feed, right? As XYDO notes, it does, after all, preserve inline advertising included in the RSS feed, so the publisher gets that. The only question, then, is why? Why does XYDO look at a tweet, grab the URL and then search for the equivalent RSS feed so that it can display the full content on its site instead of sending the user to the website itself?

It just feels greedy.

Reddit or Digg or Hacker News could easily do the same thing, yet they don't and still have thriving (well, at least Reddit and Hacker News do) communities with massive user engagement. And the publishers happily indulge, because it's a symbiotic relationship.

Put simply, XYDO feels like intentional linkjacking.

Linkjacking is the act of taking a cool piece of content and hosting it on your own site in order to get the pageviews. There's no reason XYDO can't take users' Twitter and Facebook streams, put them into a cool ranking system and then help publishers by driving traffic, but instead it keeps that traffic for its own. The original link - shared on Twitter or Facebook - would have sent the user to the publisher's site, but instead XYDO steps in the stream and intercepts the user.

Take a look at our conversation and tell us what you think - is this no different from the other apps that use RSS to deliver content? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Let us know in the comments below.

My6Sense, the personalized recommendation engine for both iOS and Android, comes to the desktop today with a Chrome extension that brings the my6sense experience to Twitter.com. What exactly is the my6sense experience? my6sense uses what it calls "digital intuition" to determine what parts of your stream, whether Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz or RSS feed, are most relevant to your interests.

We met up with Louis Gray and my6sense CEO Barak Hachamov last month to take a tour of the new product and discuss the company's plans for personalizing the Web.

Gray, a Silicon Valley blogger and startup consultant who joined the company as VP of marketing last August, set the stage for the company's new service when we spoke to him.

"You should be able to go somewhere like CNN.com," said Gray, "and have it sorted according to you."

This is the long and short of my6sense's vision of the Web - a personalized version of the Web for each person, based on how you interact with content. And the company's latest product - the Chrome extension - takes the first leap off the mobile phone and into users' browsers.

"We have a bigger dream of bringing digital intuition everywhere," explained Gray. "The first step is attacking the noise right in your browser."

my6sense's Chrome extension does just that. It adds a my6sense button to your Twitter page, which allows you to view your Twitter stream on the Twitter website as personalized by the my6sense engine. Once the extension is installed and running, it can filter your Twitter stream for the most relevant content from the past six, 12, 24 or 48 hours.

As ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick noted when he placed my6sense on his "Top 10 RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2010", a key factor for the company is that it is "focusing on monetizing a commercial API" and "that's a good business to be in." Now, the company appears to be playing that angle by showing how its "digital intuition" engine can be applied as another, personalized layer directly in the browser.

As my6sense CEO Barak Hachamov explained, "the amount of information that will compete for our attention in the future will increase by 10x." This, he said, was just the first step.

First Twitter. Next? The Web.

Bloglines was founded by Mark Fletcher in 2003 and acquired by IAC/Ask.com in 2005. While it was one of the early success stories of the RSS movement, the service never managed to get its groove back after the launch of Google Reader and a number of technical issues that made Bloglines very unreliable for a while.

There are also issues inherent in the market for RSS readers that, as Ask.com's president Doug Leeds told TechCrunch, make running the service a losing proposition for the company. According to Leeds, IAC's market research indicates that the number of people consuming RSS feeds has declined as people shift their news consumption to other sources like Twitter. Indeed, as we noted last December, one of the most interesting trends of 2009 was the gradual decline of RSS readers.

A Monopoly for Google Reader?

Back in 2008, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that Bloglines was an important part of the RSS ecosystem and that "Google should not have monopoly control over RSS readers." Now, after Newsgator and Bloglines have shuttered their web-based tools, Google Reader does effectively have this monopoly over web-based RSS readers. On the desktop, though, you still have numerous excellent options, including NetNewsWire for the Mac and FeedDemon for Windows. With Fever ($30) and Tiny Tiny RSS (free and open source), you can also host your own web-based RSS reader on your own server.

Are You Going to Miss Bloglines?

Most of us here at RWW switched away from Bloglines a long time ago. Will you miss Bloglines? Or did you switch away, too? Did you move to another RSS reader or did you abandon RSS altogether?

My6Sense: The Basics

At its core, My6Sense is a recommendation engine that focuses on highlighting the best stories in your feed subscriptions. The software can also point you towards the most interesting stories that your friends have shared on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz (support for Buzz is currently only available in the Android app). It learns about your reading habits by evaluating a number of signals while you are using the service. Among other things, these signals include which stories you click on, how long you read a story and which stories you share. Instead of just giving you a chronological list of recent stories, my6sense does away with this traditional feed reader model and uses its "digital intuition" to organize your streams according to your interests.

We have been tracking the development of my6sense for almost two years now. Most recently, we covered the hire of Louis Gray as the company's VP of Marketing and first U.S. employee. As Gray told us yesterday, launching the Android version of my6sense is an important step for the company, as it will allow a wider variety of users to experience My6Sense's abilities. Until now, My6Sense was only available on the iPhone.

New on Android: Support for Google Buzz

When you think about successful social networks, Google Buzz is probably not on the top of your list. As Gray noted, no matter the popular perception of Buzz, the quality of the stories that its users are sharing on the service is very high. Because of this, adding support for Buzz in the Android app makes sense for my6sense.

Besides support for Buzz, the Android app also features a number of nice tweaks that will hopefully make it to the iPhone app as well. You can now, for example, add a time filter to any stream, so that you won't see items that are more than 24 hours old, for example. The Android app also does a better job at displaying messages from your friends on the various supported social networks.

Looking Ahead: The Power of the My6Sense API

As a personalized RSS reader, my6sense is already a very interesting product, but the real power of the company is in its APIs. For now, my6sense only has a few partners (a business social networking site in the UK and the largest mobile operator in Israel), but the company's technology looks to be flexible enough to make sense in a variety of contexts. As Gray pointed out when we talked to him, the mobile apps are really just demos for the powerful back end that the My6Sense team has developed. It's not hard to imagine places where the my6sense API could help. Wouldn't it be nice if you could come to a site like ReadWriteWeb or the New York Times, for example, and just see the stories that would be of interest to you?

Called Headliner, the app adheres to the design standards of the rest of the OS (delightfully attractive, for Microsoft) and includes most of the features that mobile RSS users will want. See the demo video below and marvel at the slick UI, the clean display of feed items and the social media integration. Then tell us what you think it's still missing. I can only think of one or two things, really.

It's got a River of News view (most recent articles from all subscriptions), Google Reader sync, share via Twitter (some Facebook action would be nice), recommended feeds, a mysterious feature called "reset subscriptions."

What's missing? Instapaper or ReadItLater integration would be nice. Personalized feed recommendations, too.

More than anything else, though? A mobile feed reader needs a quality sorting system. Google Reader has Sort By Magic, you can use the Postrank browser extension on the desktop and my new favorite mobile solution is My6Sense. When you're on the go, you want the option of seeing just the most high-quality stuff. Scanning and pecking works great when reading feeds on the desktop, you can process a full river of news no problem that way, but mobile needs to bring you the best content from your subscriptions on a platter.

That said, Headliner looks pretty nice to me. I hope Microsoft bundles it with the OS so that millions more people can be exposed to a quality feed reading experience.

This has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic? I know I, and many people I talk to, find themselves in such need frequently. How do you access the new search? How well does it work? Read on.

How to Search Google for Blogs by Topic

The Google Blogsearch service has for a long time surfaced a small number of blogs related to any search query, above the list of results from a search of blog posts, or entries. This new search is different, though, and surfaces different results.

Do a search on the general web search interface, google.com. Then, click on the "more" link in the left-hand sidebar if "blogs" doesn't already appear as an option. Once you're looking at blogs from this perspective, then a new option will appear in the sidebar: search for posts or blog home pages related to your query.

I searched for ceramics blogs, semantic web blogs, cloud blogs, social media blogs and more. All those searches brought up pages and pages of clearly topical sources. I imagine that different searches may have different degrees of success, but this is Google - so it ought to work well.

How Good Are the Search Results?

The search results in this new search by blog feature look pretty good to me. The ranking of those results, however, seems questionable. The more closely tied the title of the blog is to your search query, the higher the blog shows up in search results. That's not the best indicator of quality or authority.

That said, in as much as I know about the topics I searched for, the top blogs in those fields definitely peppered the search results, to greater or lesser degrees.

What would I do with these search results? To be honest, I'd ask our fabulous staff developer (whom you may not steal from us) to whip up some scripts that pulled down the first 300 search results (or more) from any query I searched for, grab the RSS feeds from those sites using another script and autodiscovery, turn the feeds into an OPML file, upload them to Postrank, sort them by degrees of reader engagement, then chop off the top number from that list as suits your needs. Your mileage may vary, of course. I'd likely then use some other processes to make sure I wasn't missing too many obvious sites or including too many false positives. (And then I'd do some other stuff with it too.)

Now that the sun has set of the Technorati blog directory, and no one has done as good a job in its place as it once did, it's great to see a new option at all. The fact that full-text search is the method employed here, along with some patented analysis of the sites, is great. The patent that Slawski points to, (Indexing and retrieval of blogs, filed September 2005), "describes how it may create a 'hybrid document' about a blog out of information from both XML feeds, blog posts, and pages linked to from those feeds and posts such as profile pages," he writes.

That great. Add some ranking, some OPML export, and then we're really talking.

Long live blog search!

Information overload is something that afflicts web users on a daily basis. PARC wants to fix it with a product called Kiffets, a topic-based news aggregator which quietly launched in beta recently.

We've written before about the challenges of consuming online news in the Real-Time Web era. One of our recommendations in that post was to use a Topic Tracker product, which is what basically what Kiffets is. These types of products aim to filter, categorize and personalize news. Unfortunately for PARC, there are a lot of similar products on the market and so it'll be hard for them to stand out. Our favorite topic trackers include Google Alerts, LazyFeed, Topikality and PubSub.

How Kiffets Works

The first thing that Kiffets asks you to do when you sign up is to create channels, in categories such as 'Entertainment' and 'Politics.' However the terminology here is confusing, as Wall Street Journal is listed as a "channel" (yet it's just one source) alongside channels with multiple sources like 'Diet and Health.' I certainly think of the latter as a channel, but I don't understand why Wall Street Journal is one.

The default channels in Kiffets are a small, insular selection of Silicon Valley centric news sources. More interesting is the ability to add a custom channel. You start by searching for a topic of interest (I chose "Internet of Things"). Kiffets first checks if a channel that matches the search term already exists. In this case it didn't, so I was invited to start one.

The system then lists types of news sources - such as Google Alerts, blogs, Reddit, Technorati, Twitter feeds - and asks you to select which ones you'd like in your channel.

This is a fairly slick set-up process for channels, although my custom channel took longer than the advertised "few minutes" to populate with content.

Does it Work?

The proof of a topic tracker is, of course, in the pudding. The content in my Kiffets channel for 'Internet of Things' is (at this early stage) underwhelming. Let's hope it improves, but right now I'm getting far more interesting Internet of Things content via my equivalent LazyFeed channel.

To get a quick walk-through of the product, check out this PARC video:

It's a pretty hot idea: it's like Yahoo Pipes, for Linked Data - but easier to use and already populated with big sets of valuable information to mashup and parse. Linked Data is a growing field of datasets that are categorized with standardized markup, tied together and easily cross referencable by machines. The US and UK governments, news organizations, music data bases, social networks and other organizations are participating in the official W3C Linked Data community. Now SPARQLZ aims to make all that data easy to construct future-facing search queries for.

SPARQLZ is named after the SPARQL query language for structured data. The service also uses technologies like Yahoo Query Language and real-time push format PubSubHubbub. Search results can be delivered to SMS, Email, Webhooks, a Feed Reader or other SPARQLs.

How would I use a service like this? Just imagine stringing if/then statements together through the cloud of Linked Data (see below). As a technology publisher, I'd like to receive notification if and when SPARQLZ finds a photo (from Flickr or CORDIS) of a person from a known tech company (defined as the companies listed in Crunchbase), that's headquartered in a country with a lower than world-median GNP (per the CIA World Fact Book). Could SPARQLZ do that? In theory, it could do things like that all day long - and you and I could trade queries like that back and forth like legos to piece together whatever kind of stream we were looking for. It's a really exciting vision.

Linked Data is growing fast and has incredible potential as a development platform. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited as the key inventor of the World Wide Web, is now focused on the growth of Linked Data as the web's next step.

But in order to get beyond the borders of Wonky-land, Linked Data needs a good User Interface. For many people, the ability to set up dynamic queries, mix and match them and have them deliver alerts to various devices could scratch an itch that many of us didn't know we had.

Ok, so let's be honest. This is probably not going to be a mainstream phenomenon. But are there thousands, tens of thousands or maybe a larger number of people who could create value for themselves using a query construction and publishing model like this? Who could not or could not so easily create that kind of value on top of Linked Data today? I think there are. Maybe there are even millions of people who could capture some of the latent value in Linked Data thanks to a tool like this.

SPARQLZ is certainly intended as a way to democratize creation and use of something rich with value but previously too technically inaccessible for many people to use who might like to. In that it's of the same vein as Blogger and WordPress were to text publishing, as YouTube is to video publishing and Twitter and Facebook are to social activity feeds.

Might this be the project that makes Linked Data hacking something that far more of us can engage in? That would be great, but first the team will need to gather support and launch itself as a company. For the sake not just of this small team of data-loving dreamers deep inside a big corporation - but for the sake of all us data-loving dreamers who would love to use their tool, I hope they can do it.

The latest version of the Linking Open Data dataset cloud, as at July 2009, maintained by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch.

What Wowd promises is a tool to "filter Facebook." It lets you create custom feeds, read personalized summaries, remove game spam from your News Feed and search your social network with advanced tools.

But will Wowd "wow" you?

Wowd Does it Old-School: Installs Software Locally

To start off, it's important to understand what Wowd is not. It's not a Facebook app in the traditional sense of the word. That is, you don't interact with Wowd on Facebook itself, a choice that seems a little odd given the service's focus.

Instead, Wowd is desktop software - yes, the kind that you actually have to download, install and run on your comptuer's hard drive.

The software (Mac, Windows and Linux supported), once installed opens up a Web browser window pointed to http://localhost:8101, which is a directory on your own PC. The app runs in the browser window, allowing it to have the feel of a Web-based service, but both it and the data it creates are saved locally.

After providing Wowd the proper permissions via a Facebook authorization screen, the app gathers data by parsing your profile. This takes some time, at least it did for me and my 200-some friends. If you only have a few seconds to spare, now is not the time to test out Wowd.

Your News Feed, Filtered

The service's primary function is its filtered News Feed. It automatically marks game updates (like Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc.) as spam and hides them from view. It also lets you filter by topic or keyword and create a feed just for those terms. For example, you could create a feed for "Droid" to find friends discussing the latest Android phone or "Inception" to find people talking about the hot new movie from Christopher Nolan.

While that's a nice option, we suppose, it's also a baked-in feature in Facebook itself, even if it's under-utilized. In Facebook, you enter in a search term in the box at the top and instead of letting it default to the top result by hitting "Enter," you click the link to "See More Results." Here, one of the many filters present is "posts by friends." Ta-da, News Feed filtered!

The difference is that, in Wowd's implementation, these search queries can be saved as "custom feeds." You can even be alerted via desktop notifications when new posts arrive. Perfect for data-mining your friends, we suppose.

There's also an interesting (read: odd) bulletin-board type interface for reviewing your News Feed items. Birthday reminders, photos and "shout-outs" (status updates) are arranged as items pinned to a corkboard in a very MySpace-y widget sort of way. This is not a huge selling point for the app.

Wowd Not Wowing Me with its CPU, Memory Utilization

Finally, the fatal blow: the app killed my computer. No really, it did. Generally I scoff at reports of desktop apps being responsible for "slowing down PCs." It's usually a combination of malware, an unpatched system and a half-decade old OS that does that. But Wowd really slowed down my computer! At one point, it had eaten up over 30% CPU and over 740,000 K of memory. (For comparison purposes, the busiest tab in Chrome is at 98,000 K right now). I believe that the app was still busy archiving my profile data in the background and this isn't indicative of how it usually performs, but considering how long it spiked, I eventually had to kill it in order to put up this post. I don't think I'll be returning.

Now, don't get me wrong: I like Wowd's base concept of customized and savable keyword-based feeds - what geek wouldn't? But dealing with the first desktop app I've installed since TweetDeck reminds me of why I love the cloud - the processing power required is dealt with on their servers, not mine. And considering this PC is a few years old already, I need every spare cycle I can get.

Now, however, with the Google Buzz firehose, PostRank subscribes to one real-time PubSubHubbub feed of all publicly-available Google info. PostRank's users, the company says, will notice a big difference in the amount and depth of Buzz content.

PostRank's Ilya Grigorik explains.

"If you're an Analytics subscriber, then you will see greatly improved coverage of Google Buzz starting today: more users, more meta-data, and a more complete activity stream on your dashboard. And if you're a user of our Data Services, RSS feeds, or API's, then you will also undoubtedly benefit from the improved coverage of Buzz activity: more accurate engagement scores, and more accurate PostRank scores."

PostRank measures the level of public engagement with online content. It determines how interesting and relevant a piece of content (blog post, article, vides, etc.) is "by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction" it. So the ability to completely represent a popular service like Buzz is integral to maintaining PostRank's efficacy.

Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of PostRank and Google Buzz.

Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.

So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.

Miio Members: Find New Friends

When you first sign up for miio, you can search for friends across your social networks and email accounts or you can skip that step and just search for other miio users who share your interests. This is perhaps the key feature in miio that differentiates it from many other social networks: it's not yet another site where you have to (either manually or automatically) re-create your social graph. It's a place to meet new people who share your interests.

Now whether you're supposed to chat them up or hit on them when you meet them is something I wasn't too clear about, given that miio asks for your "relationship status" and what you're "looking for" (friends, dating, chatting, "whatever") via your profile page. Those seem like features borrowed from Facebook, and frankly, if miio just wants to be discussion site, it could do without them.

Miio's Twitter-Like Dashboard

The miio Dashboard is reminiscent of Twitter, with its "replies" and "messages to me," the latter very much like Twitter's own DMs (direct messages). But unlike Twitter, you don't just follow tweets, err...posts, limited to 140 characters or less. Users can write as much as they want. And like Facebook, those status updates can be links, photos, videos, etc. as well. They can also be questions, which then puts miio up against Q&A sites like Quora, for example.

Miio RSS

In fact, updates can even be RSS feeds thanks to a profile setting which lets you publish RSS to miio. Already a number of "members" have created miio accounts with RSS feeds - as you can see here by searching for *rss*. However, given the high profile nature of some of these accounts (ABC, AP, BBC, CBS, Huffington Post, etc.), it looks like miio created these accounts itself for others to follow, which is actually a handy feature.

From the Public Timeline or Search page, you can filter out whether or not you want to see RSS updates or whether you want to see just text updates, just photos, just videos, just questions and so on. If you switch the setting to "RSS only," miio could effectively function as a lightweight RSS reader for those who don't really do RSS.

Miio Groups

There are also groups within miio, where you can discuss items of interest to you whether that's sports or iPads. But given miio's "early adopter" mindshare, the biggest groups seem to be tech-focused ones like those discussing iOS, startups or even miio competitor Google Buzz.

Final Thoughts: Too Much of a Good Thing, miio Needs to Diet

Although miio gets some things right, simplicity is not one of them. It's not clear yet what exactly miio wants to be when it grows up, why there's a need for this service and who should use it.

Our advice to miio, ditch the advanced feature set (it's overwhelming!) and focus on doing just one thing and doing it well. Groups, perhaps. Google Buzz lacks a "groups" feature and although FriendFeed has them, that service lost quite a few members after its Facebook acquisition. Do discussion groups and do them better than anyone else. And don't allow top followed members to dominate discussions like on Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter and every other "social" service out there today. Make it more democratic.

And simplify, simplify, simplify. Twitter worked because it was basic and easy. That's how miio should start too. It can add in advanced filtering, location-based services, metadata and all the rest later on, if necessary. (Or perhaps not at all).

With a redirected singular goal like this, miio could have a chance at attracting not just the tech geeks who sign up for anything shiny and new but those who just like to go online and chat about things they're into, no matter what those may be. Obviously, the folks behind miio have the technical know-how to build a great service, now they just need to establish a sharper focus. Good luck, miio!

Instead of overloading you with information as you increase your RSS subscriptions, Fever actually works better the more feeds you add. It automatically picks out the most-discussed feeds from a given period of time and surfaces those to the top of the reader, assigning temperatures next to the headlines (hence the name "Fever" - Get it? These feeds are hot!) The more feeds it has to work with, the better these rankings become. Meanwhile, unread counts are hidden so you can focus on the signal while ignoring the noise...and do so completely guilt-free.

Already, Fever worked as an iPhone/iPod Touch application thanks to its included optimized interface for the small screen of Apple mobile devices. Now Ashes brings the Fever feed-reading experience to the iPad as well.

About Ashes

Developed by freelancers James Finley and Tom Krush, Ashes is the first native application built using the API from Fever, which itself was created by designer and developer Shaun Inman.

In order to use Ashes, you have to first have a Fever installation up-and-running. That requirement may be a limiting feature for casual RSS subscribers since Fever is neither a free nor a hosted application. Fever is actually a PHP and MySQL app that runs on your own server and requires a one-time licensing fee of $30. However, for serious RSS consumers, such as those in the blogging biz for example, Fever is an app well worth the investment.

How it Works

The new Ashes app essentially works as an iPad interface to your own Fever database that you've already set up and installed on your server. It syncs your feeds to and from the iPad every 5 minutes, even allowing for offline access, a useful feature for those with Wi-Fi-only iPads who may want to continue reading the feeds even after wandering away from a Wi-Fi hotspot.

The articles in Ashes can be read within the application, thanks to an in-app browser, and a simple sharing feature lets you email articles to a friend or save them for later reading with Instapaper.

Unfortunately, a couple of early reviews in the iTunes App Store hint at issues for this newly-released app, but Finely addresses these on the Ashes blog. He says that there were two bugs which weren't caught during beta testing, one which caused the app to crash and the other which affected the syncing function. The updated version (1.0.1) should fix these bugs and is now available in the App Store.

Going forward, a future version of Ashes will include Twitter and Delicious integration, faster sync, better performance and an iPhone interface.

Ashes is $6.99 and can be found in iTunes here.

Instead of just watching "live updates on every topic you care about, simultaneously," the site is now the "super-lazy way to blog about everything you love".

Lazyfeed plans to push its redesign live this morning at 10 a.m. PST (0700 GMT). At the same time it will be moving in a decidedly Web 2.0 direction.

Lazyfeed's biggest emphasis in this redesign is social network integration. Now, users can log in using their Facebook and Twitter accounts in order to post content to those sites, as well as connect with friends they already have on those networks. (On another note, how long will it be until we can stop mentioning this as a new feature and simply say "so-and-so finally caught on to the whole social networking thing"?)

In addition to social network integration, the redesign incorporates a cleaner stream of updates much like any number of other sites we've become accustomed to. No longer will content categories appear in a static position on the page, intermittently showing the word "update" and new content. Instead, the categories will stream down the center of the page, much like on Facebook, Twitter or FriendFeed. Or, as the company's About page states, "Lazyfeed turns the Web into a stream of everything you love, and lets you enjoy 'fishing'."

The primary difference compared to the old site, however, is that as content streams down the center of the page and you read along, you can also write about what you're reading in a left-hand column. The site has also gone real-time social, as is the general trend these days, allowing you to comment on posts and receive notifications when others reply. As the new new tagline says: "Lazyfeed lets you endlessly talk about your favorite topics, without even trying."

In essence, the redesign seems like a Facebook-esque feed reader - much like what Facebook might be hoping to achieve in some ways. With its increasingly social features, Lazyfeed lets you get content recommendations from friends, interact with those bits of content socially, and immediately share them and comment on them with other friends. It does all of this while maintaining the topical categorization you would find in a feed reader, rather than being based solely on social connections.