rss

Google updated the iPhone version of its Reader product Monday. For the first time, mobile users will be able to star items for later and browse through items in a large list similar to the desktop version of the Web app. To view stories, users simply need to click on the headlines and the story will expand. In previous iterations, clicking a headline would take you to a new page, requiring users to click back before expanding another story.

One thing you can't do is expand several stories at once, meaning mobile users will need to have access to … Read more

Google upgraded its Reader product yesterday with a handful of important new features that let people share content with anyone from any Web site.

Previously its sharing features were confined to whatever RSS feeds you were subscribed to. As a solution to this problem, Google has created a small bookmarklet users can add to their browser's toolbar to simply share whatever page they're looking at to their shared items feed. Users can also attach personal notes on these, or any other shared items in a similar fashion to Facebook's share or Tumblr's ReBlog implementation, which lets … Read more

There are several solid newsreaders for Mac OS X including the popular NewsFire and NetNewsWire which I've talked about here before. But I found an application today which puts a different sort of visual spin on the standard newsreader. It's called Times and it organizes feeds in an entirely different, though immediately familiar way. One quick note: this application only works on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Most newsreaders offer a three-paned interface with your feed list on the left, headlines with summaries on the upper right, and full stories (once clicked) in the lower right. What … Read more

Joining the growing list of remixed Mozilla applications such as Songbird and Flock is Spicebird. Besides keeping the avian theme in Firefox and Thunderbird, open-source Spicebird takes the core of Thunderbird, the calendaring power of the Thunderbird plug-in Lightning, and integrated contact list chatting capabilities, and ties them all together with a widget-based landing page.

Loaded with potential, but heavily in beta, India-based Spicebird has a long way to go before it's ready for general use. The bugs and challenges facing users are noticeable nearly from the moment you start up the program. The interface and most of the … Read more

Sorry about that headline. It just seems that every medium is getting its own "what's hot" feed these days. Even Twitterheads are getting in the act, with the new Twitlinks (review), which I find of dubious value. I mean, really, we're talking about Twitter here, not the New York Times. But the newly relaunched ReadBurner looks like it could, possibly, become genuinely useful.

It's a simple service. It tracks the number of times items are shared in Google's RSS Reader, and puts the most-recently popular stories (assuming sharing means popularity) at the top of … Read more

Reading blog posts on Google Reader is cool, but creating a feed full of playable video clips is far more entertaining. Video host Hulu's latest update to its sharing tools has done just that, letting you tweak several RSS feeds to automatically include embed code that will let a video play in its entirety right in your feed reader. More importantly, this can double as a simple way to get around any domain restrictions put in place by your IT department to keep you from watching Hulu videos while at work.

To get it to work you simply need … Read more

Chumby Industries, manufacturer of the eponymous huggable touch-screen Wi-Fi widget gadget, announced Monday that it has raised $12.5 million in Series B venture funding. The lead investor in the round was JK&B Capital, but existing investors Avalon Ventures, Masthead Venture Partners, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures also contributed.

A friendly-looking device that you configure online, the Chumby cycles through a rotation of custom widgets from weather to Google Calendar to cult-hit shopping site Woot.com. Many of these come from the Chumby Network, a platform of user- and partner-created applications that can be added to the little … Read more

vTap, one of my personal favorites for video search, has a new feature that I think video junkies will find immensely useful. It's a new recommendation service that will pull in videos related to whatever keywords you give it, and maintain them in a simple feed that's updated constantly. As a user you can keep tabs on new videos that pop-up on the feed either through vTap's site, on your mobile phone, or social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

Best of all is that adding keywords to your feed is natural. Since the service revolves around … Read more

Hunting down dastardly captcha hackers and spyware slimeballs is busy work, even for a man as talented as Power Downloader. Power doesn't have a lot of free time, so it's hard to remember to check all the Web sites that are important to him. His solution: instead of surfing a list of bookmarks, Power Downloader uses RSS feeds and FeedDemon to make the news and podcasts come to him.

FeedDemon is one of the best programs for managing your RSS collection. The interface is slick and easy to personalize, which is important since Power wasn't too impressed … Read more