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.

How do you read ReadWriteWeb? Are you subscribing to our RSS Feed? Do you receive our Daily or Weekly Email newsletter? Are you following us on Twitter, Facebook or Google+? Is the way you read ReadWriteWeb your preferred way to gather news?

What's your favored method of news consumption?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

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?

One of those disappointed users was Web developer Emmanuel Pire. Not content to see the beloved sharing feature go away, Pire built a replica of it on his own server and wrote a script that adds a "Share" button to the new Google Reader interface. This workaround doesn't restore the functionality 100%, but it comes pretty close.

First, some caveats. This hack involves adding a script to your desktop browser. Thus, it won't work for your Google account across browsers and devices. For now, it only works on Firefox and Chrome, so users of Safari, Internet Explorer and other browsers are out of luck.

Finally, it's worth noting that the following instructions will not restore the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet or the "Share with note" button. For many users, the back-and-forth comments on shared items was a central part of the social experience. That's still missing, but the sharing part can be restored. It actually works quite well.

How to Get the "Share" Button back

To restore the "share" button in Google Reader, follow these steps:

1. Go to this page using Chrome or Firefox and hit the green "Install" button in the upper right. (You'll need to have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox first.)
2. Go to Google Reader. You should now see a "Share" button in the upper right (not where it used to be, but this'll do). There's also a box in the left column that lets you add friends. Note: This feature will only work if your friends also install the script.
3. Click on the "Share" button in the upper right (you may need to have an item open to see the button). You'll be asked to set a password and confirm your email address. Do both of these things.
4. Email your old Google Reader friends and excitedly ask them to join you. They'll all need to install the script and follow these steps as well. You might as well just send them a link to this article.
5. Once everyone is signed up, you can search for them in the "Add friends by email" box on the left. If they're taking their sweet time, you can bug them via email from this box as well.
6. As you find and subscribe to people, you may want to add them all to a folder. Create a new folder called "Friends" or "Shared Items" and be sure to put everybody's feeds in there.
7. Use Google Reader just as you used to, hitting the new "Share" button each time you come across something you'd like your friends to see.

Again, this workaround only brings things about 90% back to normal. Some things, like building an inline commenting feature, are a bit trickier for a third party developer to implement. As an alternative, you can always hit the "+1" button to publicly share it or you can hit the "Share" button to send the item to your newly-resurrected Google Reader network.

So how does this work? Pire realized that the old sharing feature was essentially a glorified RSS feed to which others could subscribe. His hack generates a feed containing any item on which you click "Share" and then allows your friends to subscribe to that feed. He requires users to set a password so that others can't inject items and effectively share them on your behalf.

We tried it out with a few of our old Reader pals and it comes pretty close to replicating the original functionality. Give it a try and lets us know in the comments what you think.

The concerns echoed sentiments that were by then flooding Twitter and other nooks and crannies of the Web. In the process of redesigning Reader, the team decided to kill off the social features long beloved by many power users of the service. Suddenly, friending, sharing and commenting were all gone, as was the outbound RSS feed of shared items each user generated.

Iranian bloggers who used the service to get around government censors were angered by the changes. Even a former product manager for Google Reader chimed in with a biting critique of the overhaul and a small, but passionate #OccupyGoogleReader meme was born. So what is everybody so upset about?

Putting the User Last

It may not have been an overwhelmingly huge number of people that were using the "Share" and "Share With Comment" buttons on the old Google Reader, but those that did were doing so on a regular basis, probably for several years.

What developed over time was a sort of mini-social network of people sharing and discussing content. It was smaller and more contained than Twitter or Facebook, with a sharper focus on discovery and discussion.

In my own Google Reader network, I personally had quite a few real-world friends, a few former colleagues and some Internet acquaintances, such as Wall Street Journal social media guru Zach Seward, who always shared really interesting stuff on Reader.

By taking away the service's social features, Google stamped out that miniature network entirely. I can still find those people on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or elsewhere, but that little social ecosystem we had is now gone. Lights out.

Google clearly wants Reader users to move on over to Google Plus, where the company rightfully points out that we can create new circles and share our content that way. And hey, Google has every right to do whatever it wants with its free services. Some folks have used the product for five or six years and never paid a dime to do so.

Still, there's something about this approach that just feels reckless, if not somewhat arrogant on Google's part. For better or worse, users of Web services feel a certain sense of empowerment and even entitlement. They know that if the company running the service they love so much screws up or wrongs them in anyway, they have the power to put them out of business. That may be dramatically less true with giants like Google and Facebook, but just because they're immune from the crowd doesn't mean they should ignore it all together.

Another Social Flub For Google?

Google is known for making decisions informed by data, often very large sets of it. That's a great practice, and one that undoubtedly often leads to some smart moves and happy users.

In this case, the Reader team probably saw that a relatively small number of people were using those features, and decided that it was probably safe to kill them off in favor of pushing users toward Google Plus, which is a big, new priority for the company.

It's ironic in a way, because in its big push to reposition itself as a social-friendly company, Google just displaced an entire community of users, effectively shutting down a social ecosystem that had existed for years.

In the end, Google may well see Plus flourish into a massive, widely-used social network and Reader users may forget how mad they were about yesterday's changes. Who knows, perhaps with tighter integration, Google Reader could ride the coattails of its socially-savvy big sister toward something resembling mainstream adoption.

It's not as though integrating Reader with Plus is a bad idea, by any means. But whenever you have a community of passionate users who use and love your product, taking away features should be done cautiously and with a very strong, clearly-explained justification. For many users of Google Reader, the way this was executed didn't meet those criteria. If nothing else, there are a few lessons to be learned here for the company's next product launch.

But are there in fact any viable alternatives to Google Reader?

I believe that comment was a little disingenuous from Gray, because he knows that Google dominates what's left of the RSS Reader market. There are always alternatives, but the reality is that relatively few people will use them. What's more, most of the alternatives rely on Google Reader for content.

So Google knows full well that most people will either stick with Google Reader, or still have a connection to it. If users do stick with Reader (by far the most likely scenario), they will use Plus a lot more now that it's the only way to share.

RSS Readers Ain't What They Used To Be

This is another key turning point for RSS Readers, perhaps the final innovation in this long struggling market. No longer are RSS Readers independent products with their own devoted, reading-focused users - or "word-y people" as one Google Reader fan described them on my G+ profile.

Sure, the writing was already on the wall. Formally popular consumer RSS Readers like Bloglines and Newsgator have by now either disappeared, morphed into new products, or became focused on markets that will pay for them (which usually means the enterprise market).

The RSS Reader market has declined because reading content is a very fragmented experience these days. That was my conclusion even back in 2009, when I cited the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Nearly two years later and the fragmentation has only multiplied. As well as Twitter and Facebook, there are tablet-focused apps such as Flipboard and News.me, services like Instapaper and ReadItLater which make it even easier to read articles on mobile devices, and newly popular social services - like Google Plus.

Where To Now For The Google Reader Community? Google Plus Of Course...

Even despite all of the changes in the way people consume content on the Web, Google Reader had been the holdout as a specialist RSS Reader product. It has (had?) a passionate community of RSS Reader fanatics.

While RSS reading as an activity will continue in Google Reader, as of today the sharing features have been "retired" and moved to Google Plus. Also the note-taking features. And because almost all community activity happens on social networks - like Google Plus - that effectively spells the end of any real innovation in the RSS Reader market.

So what of these supposed alternatives to Google Reader? In fact, many of them rely on Google Reader. Google Reader powers - or its content can be plugged into - a number of the products that have forced the likes of Bloglines and Newsgator out of the consumer RSS market. Services like Flipboard for the iPad (Google Reader is one content input option) and Feedly (multi-platform, but one of its core features is that it syncs with Google Reader).

So even if Google Reader users migrate to another product, they'll likely still be connected to Google Reader in some way.

May As Well Get Used To It

Louis Gray positioned the changes today as giving Google Reader users more granular ways to share things, by way of the circles feature of Plus. So, for example, you might share a technology post in Google Reader to your "Tech Friends" circle. That does sounds appealing to me. And already in my tests I've seen how easy it is to share things from Google Reader to Plus.

So for people like me, where Google Plus is my (Google-related) social network anyway, the Reader changes are a positive thing. As for Google Reader's avid fans, I feel for them - they have lost some beloved features. But they will simply have to get used to the changes, because there are no real alternatives left in the consumer RSS Reader market.

This ad program builds on Flipboard Pages, Flipboard's first step into content that's specific to the reading environment of its app. Instead of showing a Web view, Flipboard Pages display articles using "print-inspired layouts, typography and imagery" built for Flipboard. Beginning with the Condé Nast partnership, publishers can now easily intersperse full-page ads into the Flipboard versions of their content.

Regarding future ad partnerships, Christel van der Boom at Flipboard says, "We are already working with a number of publishers in our Flipboard Pages program that we announced in December."

We've been watching the business model take shape for social magazine apps like Flipboard, and, thus far, the space has proven difficult to monetize. The Flipboard app is free, and it doesn't charge users for subscriptions. Furthermore, users have historically resisted ads in their RSS readers.

In light of Apple's tightening restrictions on in-app purchases, which has already forced some changes to major apps for distributing published content, revenue models aimed at reading apps like Flipboard may be a necessary complement, if not a replacement, for selling issues through standalone magazine apps.

Flipboard, of course, is not merely an RSS reader; it can pull content from a huge range of services, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn news feeds, as well as Flickr and Instagram photos. Flipboard also offers curated topical feeds of its own. Future plans include personalized story recommendations, as well as an iPhone version, but the company has not announced timelines for those products. Van der Boom says Flipboard is "shooting for late summer" for the iPhone app release.

American Express is the first advertiser, displaying its ads in The New Yorker, and Lexus will begin running ads in Wired and Bon Appétit in October.

The ads are full-page displays interspersed between content pages. Flipboard renders animated page flips, using the iPad's touchscreen to provide a magazine-like experience. Likewise, these static, full-page ads are reminiscent of magazines, but tap targets on the ads send the reader to the brand's website or social media page. Van der Boom says it's "too soon to say" whether the expected iPhone version will display these full-page ads.

It remains to be seen whether independent publishers will be able to take advantage of this ad model. It's one thing for Condé Nast, a worldwide publisher with existing advertising relationships and oceans of audience data, to test this new revenue stream with a top-of-the-market advertiser like American Express. But any Web feed, even free, hosted blogs, can be pulled into Flipboard. Will Flipboard open this program to smaller-scale advertisers, so that smaller-scale publishers can get in on the action?

"We're taking our first steps with Condé," van der Boom says, "and plan to grow the program with other publishers, including independent publishers."

But what's most unique about this app is the way it reformats the text for the small screen. The "floating text" reading experience, which gives the app its name, reflows text originally formatted for the Web for better reading on mobile devices.

"Floating" Text Makes the Web Easy to Read on Mobile

This floating text experience has its roots in the technology Scribd introduced last year, when it began offering a way to convert Adobe PDF documents into HTML5. At the time, the company learned a lot about how to transform and rearrange text from one format and one type of interface to another.

In the new native iPhone app called Float, the team leveraged that expertise so that you can now zoom in on text using pinch gestures, and then see that text automatically reflowed for that particular zoom level. You can also scroll left or right in the app, as you would with a book or magazine.

Content Sources

The content in Float comes from over 150 websites, including The Associated Press, Fortune, CNET, HuffingtonPost, Engadget, Entertainment Weekly and People, but it also comes from the information your friends are sharing on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and, of course, Scribd. And you can share content from the app back to those same sites, too.

A special browser bookmarklet lets you save items you find online for later reading on Float.com or within the iPhone app.

A Unique Mobile Reading Experience

Does the idea of yet another "social reading" app leave you dry? This is, after all, a crowded space - filled with apps like Pulse and Flipboard and others like them. But Scribd says its key differentiating factor is its focus on the reading experience, particularly the small screens of smartphones. In addition to the reformatted text, Float offers an Instagram-like "reading styles" option which lets you choose between different formats that work better for different users, like e-ink, high contrast as well as fun ones like "Gutenberg," because, well, just because.

The app itself exists in a unique niche - somewhere in between the social news readers and the "Read It Later's" or Instapaper's of the news consumption world.

In the future, Scribd will look at different business models to aid its publishers - for example, offering them the opportunity to insert ads into the articles in a better format than is typically possible on mobile. It will also attempt to bring in premium publishers offering subscriptions, and is now in talks with newspapers interested in exploring that option.

At launch, Float is available for the iPhone and Web only, but an iPad app and Android version will launch this fall. You can give Float a try for yourself, here.

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.

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.

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.

Feedly is not a social magazine for tablets the way Flipboard or Zite are. It does not build feeds from Twitter or Facebook. It does not crawl websites as Zite does. Feedly keeps to its roots as a pure reader built from an aggregation of RSS feeds, delivered elegantly and easy to use. The closest example to Feedly as a reader would probably be Pulse, which has great visual feeds and horizontal scrolling through sources. In comparison, Feedly is much more of a magazine application.

The layout of the app is simple. There is a small black bar on the bottom of the app that can control anything you want within the reader. You can Like, tweet, email, search directly from the app, copy article links or open in a browser from the bottom bar. One good function that we liked a lot was the inclusion of a button that will save articles to Instapaper or Read It Later. The tweet button has an automatic URL shortener, powered by Bit.ly.

In terms of user interface, Feedly for the iPad (where we tested it) has two choices - white background, black text or black background, white text. The ability to choose between on or the other is smart on Feedly's part. I prefer white text on black and found that the app was more enjoyable as a reader if I had the choice. You can scroll through articles from a source one by one with a swipe or through feeds on the browser page. One drawback is that the app is meant to run only in portrait mode which means if you are using it on a tablet you will not be able to use the standup option on your case.

Feedly is not going to run into any problems with publishers, the way Zite has. Since it is an RSS reader, it can bring in the ad stream of a blog or publisher through a partnership program the company has set up. In testing, multiple times we saw an ad spot within the reader that says "If you own this blog, contact us to enable your ad stream." Articles are rendered within the app with ads enabled and Feedly has held to the wishes of publishers who want their articles read in "web-only" mode.

Feedly may not be the most innovative or dynamic magazine application on the market. Flipboard is the leader in the category, Zite and Pulse both to fantastic apps in the mobile realm. In terms of functionality, simplicity and elegance, the Feedly reader can compete with anyone.

Yet, what if Flipboard and other app makers could work directly with the publishers and create a new ecosystem? One that drives Apple and the others out of the middle-man equation and creates a prosperous new model for both content creators and aggregators alike?

It looks like that is what Flipboard is trying to do.

News publishers dragged their feet on creating the first round of Web content and subsequently watched their business models get left behind. When consumer tablets became a reality, publishers were seemingly ready to be the first ones on the boat but the explosion of the popularity of the iPad has not correlated in to revenue. Once again, publishers are scrambling to figure out how to convert new technology into real-world dollars.

When Flipboard CEO Mike McCue says that he wants to create a billion-dollar company, publishers have to be afraid that he can actually do it, built on the backs of their content. As it stands now, the company sees itself as just another way to browse the Web.

"What you are seeing is still the Web but a new way to browse the Web," a Flipboad spokesperson said. "What if you built the Web today, what would it look like?"

That, in theory, would be Flipboard Pages, a trial offering the company started in December where publishers can opt to have their articles available as an "article" as opposed to "read on web." Articles in Flipboard Pages are seen with "print-inspired layouts, typography and imagery."

This all sounds good for the app makers and the publishers ... in theory.

However, it is important to Flipboard to not charge subscriptions for content. The idea with Flipboard Pages is to keep the information that is being curated free and uncluttered while adding full-page ads within the browsing experience. So, you are reading an article in the New York Times without ads, for instance, and you flip the page to what would be an ad page. Just like paper.

If Flipboard is a "new way to browse the Web" then it also has the potential to solve one of the problems that publishers currently have with Apple, which is insisting on taking 30% of app purchases, including subscriptions. If publishers can just go straight to Flipboard or the other social magazines and work with them on an advertising ecosystem, curation apps can be free to consumers and still make money for all involved.

In some ways, Apple has created a new kind of paper. But at some point the ecosystem that Apple has created is going to have to say "hey, thanks for creating this new mode of consumption, but butt out of our business deals, OK?"

Since the app makers have beat the publishers to the content-delivery punch once again, the publishers must start working with the app makers to create an ecosystem where everybody emerges a winner.

Want to hear more on Flipboard and the future of news apps? Flipboard CEO Mike McCue will be at the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit taking place in New York City on June 13 and 14. Learn more.

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.

An important question for Flipboard, NewsMix and other such apps is: how will they make money? Wired, TIME and other specialist magazines will rely on the subscription model (once it gets sorted out for the iPad). However, Flipboard and its ilk face the same issues with monetization as RSS Readers did in the previous Web era.

Tough to Monetize

A big part of the reason why the consumer RSS Reader market never took off was that it was almost impossible to monetize. Users balked at ads inside their RSS Readers, so the main RSS Reader companies ended up turning to the enterprise market for the bulk of their revenues. Newsgator is a great example. It owns a range of sophisticated RSS Reader products, but it shuttered its browser-based RSS Reader in mid-2009 and now appears to focus mostly on SharePoint integration (i.e. the enterprise market).

Flipboard and other social magazines can of course choose to make money by being a paid app in iPad and other app stores. NewsMix has headed in this direction, charging $2.99 for its app. Flipboard has chosen to remain free, a sensible move given that it wants to maintain its first mover advantage and ramp up its user numbers.

Likewise, if the App Store ever allows iPad magazine apps to provide a decent subscription service, Flipboard would be wise to hold off on that too. Not just because publishers will probably complain, but again it's an impediment to user growth - which is surely Flipboard's primary concern, given that it has defined a new market.

Flipboard's Plan For Adverts

Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue told Robert Scoble when Flipboard launched in July last year that they were planning a "new, design-centric, advertising that could possibly fill a page or a portion of a page." That same month, McCue told Business Insider that "when we build our business model [...] it's not going to be on the backs of the publishers, it will be with the publishers." He went on to say that Flipboard plans to introduce "a totally new form of advertising."

It's clear that Flipboard is looking at (or at least talking about) a predominantly advertising based revenue model, much like traditional magazines have. It thinks that the visual appeal of advertising that magazines have enjoyed, will translate to its product too. The contentious issue will be how it gives a cut to publishers, since - unlike Wired and TIME - Flipboard is not a publisher.

That's essentially the same problem that RSS Reader Bloglines grappled with in 2004-05. Bloglines didn't launch advertising at that time, due to the outcry from publishers. Flipboard hasn't yet broached the subject with publishers - and there's no rush. Flipboard bought itself some time to figure out a solution, by taking $10.5 million in initial funding.

If Flipboard is serious about this new form of advertising, then it's a tall order. Any publisher that is even moderately successful relies heavily on brand advertising. Many publishers will be skeptical of a profit-sharing arrangement outside of their own sites.

Acquisition May Be Flipboard's Answer

Flipboard was the first mover in the social magazine space, so the reality is that it's going to be an attractive target for acquisition - much as Bloglines was, Flickr was, Delicious was, and so on. My bet is that Flipboard continues to ramp up its user base, with scant regard to business model.

It may still experiment with a new form of publisher-friendly, design focused advertising. But it will be a risky experiment. Nobody has yet figured out how to share advertising revenues with publishers from within a news reader-type application.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments on how social magazines will make money.

Just as Bloglines was the first browser-based RSS Reader to gain traction, Flipboard was the first magazine-style iPad reader to gain a following in 2010. Bloglines became the dominant RSS Reader in 2004-05, mostly because it was first to market with a decent product and it scaled well. OK, Bloglines eventually lost the plot when it got acquired by Ask.com and allowed Google Reader to usurp it. The same fate may occur to Flipboard, if/when it gets acquired. But one thing's for sure, it won't be NewsMix that beats Flipboard.

The reason is pretty simple: NewsMix offers much the same feature mix as Flipboard. There's nothing astoundingly new here. Some of what NewsMix offers is slightly better. It puts content into better context, for example creating headlines and opening paragraphs for tweets (Flipboard just displays the tweet). Some of what Flipboard offers is better than NewsMix, for example Flipboard's ability to create custom sections.

Both products are visually slick, which as users we've come to expect in an iPad app modeled after a digital magazine. This is clearly a trend in the 'news reader' market currently, iPad apps that are visually appealing and which integrate social media services like Facebook and Twitter. NewsMix and Flipboard both pull content in from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, as well as allow users to 'share' it out again via those same services or via email.

NewsMix does a particularly good job with its video and photo sections, which are separated out and highlighted on the main page. It's a nice idea, because sometimes you just want to relax and watch a video... or look at a photo of a bathing hedgehog.

Even if this is a fairly oranges and oranges comparison, the fact that NewsMix does not allow the user to customize their sections is a big minus. I like how Flipboard allows me to create a special section based on my Twitter list for RWW staff, for example. In NewsMix I cannot do that. To become a default news reader application on the iPad in this day and age, the app has to allow the user to customize what they see. NewsMix should rectify this.

I also prefer the Flipboard user experience, the page-turning UI is wonderful and feels more fluid when browsing. Perhaps that's because I've become familiar with it, over time. Again, another advantage the first mover has. Innovative companies like Flipboard introduce a new type of product and, if it gets traction, they end up setting expectations about what such products should deliver.

It's healthy though to see more "social magazine" apps come onto the market. Other apps in this space worth keeping an eye on include Pulse News Reader, Reeder, FLUD, TweetMag and the upcoming Betaworks app (currently in private beta) News.me.

Right now the activity is all iPad focused, but 2011 is expected to be a big year for tablets in general. So we'll see other apps like Flipboard and NewsMix coming to Android tablets, Windows tablets, and more before the year is out.

For now I'm sticking with Flipboard and I'm betting most of Flipboard's current users will too. If you're an iPad user, which app are you using for news reading?

Last month we compared the addition of the "like" feature to Facebook and this month, we can't help but notice that the subscription service brings WordPress a little bit closer to fellow self-publishing platform Tumblr.

Just like Tumblr's "Follow" feature, which allows Tumblr users to follow each other, WordPress' subscription feature will allow users to subscribe to other WordPress.com hosted blogs. The feature is simple: Click "Subscribe to blog" on any WordPress.com blog you visit and the posts will appear in your subscriptions tab. Upon subsequent visits, users will be alerted if any blogs they've subscribed to have new content.

The site has also made it simple to get instant notification of new blogs posts via instant messenger.

Keeping subscriptions to on-site blogs is an important part of the feature, as it increases the reason for becoming a WordPress member, instead of running your own installation of the blogging platform. The feature is also good news for some bigger publishers, like technology blogs TechCrunch and GigaOM, which are both hosted on WordPress. As WordPress notes in its blog post, RSS feeds and readers "can be tricky to manage for a non-technical person", and a subscription feature like this will make is easier for the non-techie.

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?