rss

If you've ever wondered how much you're costing Netflix when you go on those month-long movie binges, you should give Feedflix a go. It takes any one of your personal Netflix RSS feeds and figures out how many movies you're watching per month and what the cost comes out to for each DVD. It also breaks down your biggest return days and how long you tend to keep titles.

Ultimately, most of this information is useless, as with some simple math a Netflix membership tends to end up costing less per-rental after just four DVDs based on … Read more

You can now filter the items in your Facebook News Feed depending on what you're hoping to check out, thanks to a cool new drop-down menu. Previously, you could sort the list by a few Facebook mainstays: status updates, photo-related updates, and "posted items."

The filter additions, originally reported late last night by TechCrunch, are events, groups, fan pages, several applications that differ by the member (my filter offers me the option to search by the "Bumper Sticker" application, which I have never installed but which I guess a fair number of people on my … Read more

RSS reader start-up Bloglines has rolled out the first step of an extensive redesign, launching a new "skin" to its beta testers and starting to work advertising into members' feed readers.

On the ad front, Bloglines has started putting display ads into search results and into individual members' "start pages," with more forms of advertising on the way--specifically within feed readers.

Bloglines first started its beta rollout nearly a year ago; the early player in the RSS feeder niche has faced increased competition from Google Reader as what was once a Mountain View, Calif., side project … Read more

Mozilla has released a 0.1 version of Snowl (official blog post), an experimental add-in for Firefox that reads news and nanoblog feeds. It's an attempt to marry together the incoming separate content streams that many of us have feeding on to our desktops full time: News and blog stories via RSS, and social and personal communications from services like Twitter.

Of course, under the skin they're all just RSS feeds. The key to mashing these feeds together is treating them somewhat differently depending on where they came from, and adding in capabilities to let you take action … Read more

Web-based RSS feed aggregator Spreed is casual reading's worst enemy. A speed-reader extraordinaire like Robert Scoble might enjoy it as a way to dig through even more stories a day, but at its heart it's kind of like visiting an aquarium with one of those moving sidewalks; you're still seeing what you came there to see--you just don't have the luxury of taking your time.

Time is actually the key focus of Spreed. It centers on a speed-reading player that will only show you three or four words of a story at a time, and in … Read more

If you've accumulated hundreds or thousands of RSS feeds in your favorite reader you might be looking for a way to sort through them all. Of many solutions out there, Google Reader offers just a few ways to weed out lame feeds either by tracking inactivity or integrating tags for the sake or sorting. These tools are helpful, but far from a solution to save you from having to go through all your content to get to the good stuff.

Enter AidRSS, a ridiculously simple story sorter that uses PostRank, a rating system that measures how good a post … Read more

This top-notch feed reader will devour your RSS and Atom feeds, though some users might find it too basic. Snarfer keenly follows the "keep it simple" adage in every function. An uncomplicated, uncluttered interface follows a generic layout of left-side listed entries and a central preview pane. Set your browser to recognize Snarfer as your feed catcher and you'll find the program has already entered the link from the clipboard into your add-feed dialog.

To save an entry, simply drag it to a Save folder. E-mailing an entry and other basic functions are available in the context … Read more

Of the several news readers offered in Apple's iTunes App Store to date, NetNewsWire stands out as the most appealing. Unlike Mobile News from the Associated Press, NetNewsWire pulls in stories from multiple sources, and unlike Google Reader, it does so nearly instantly in a true native application (Google Readers whisks you to an iPhone-optimized Web application after you select it from a list of more options on Google Mobile.)

Like many other applications, NetNewsWire is the iPhone version of an already-brawny Web service operated by NewsGator, and one whose desktop versions CNET Download.com editors have already acclaimed … Read more

Mippin, a mobile feed reading service I looked at back in late 2007, has undergone a world of change in the last 10 months. On Tuesday night, the site is launching a new version aimed specifically at iPhone users--a growing segment of the market which will soon be even larger with the forthcoming release of the 3G model.

This new version follows in the footsteps of older iterations, but has been tweaked to fit the screen a little better, as well as deliver an overall performance increase in page load times. The company has also laid the groundwork for an … Read more