feeds

2007 was the year of platforms, and I'm just about ready to call 2008 the year of social aggregators, or services that help you group together and manage all the social sites you're a part of. Opening up (in private beta) on Monday is Socialthing, a new contender that joins the ranks of Plaxo, MyBlogLog, Spokeo, Iminta, Profilactic, Friendfeed, and Facebook in giving you a single place to aggregate and interact with all that information in one, centralized feed.

As with some of the others in this space, Socialthing takes your log-ins and usernames from each service and … Read more

Ray Ozzie has a history of trying to break through software and usability barriers. With Lotus Notes, he and his team spent years creating the underlying client/server collaboration technology to enable synchronization, or replication of e-mail online and offline.

His second major initiative, Groove Networks, took the synchronization and collaboration concept into the peer-to-peer realm, allowing individual PCs to communicate directly with one another.

Groove Networks was sold to Microsoft in March 2005, and Ozzie began his next major iteration on a much bigger stage, as Microsoft's chief software architect.

Whenever I'm setting up on a new computer or test machine at work, or even after I've downloaded my must-have programs on a new home machine, one of the first things I do is grab an RSS newsreader. Though you can use Web browser favorites to hit and save your most visited sites, newsreaders have a few advantages that make getting all the latest updates even easier.

With a good newsreader on your machine, anytime you see an available RSS feed at a Web site (usually with an orange RSS or XML label), you can have all the … Read more

FriendFeed is leaving private beta tonight and opening up to everyone. It's a potentially useful service that aggregates what your friends are doing around the Web into one big feed you can easily scan. In other words, if you've got friends who Twitter, friends who post photos on Flickr, friends who favorite videos on YouTube, and friends who tag music on Last.fm or sites on del.icio.us, this service will keep track of them all. Except what your pals are doing on Facebook--that service was not scannable by FriendFeed in the beta version I tried.

The … Read more

Don't have a missing iPhone, but want another Twitter-aided tool that can save you from life's annoyances? Check out Commuter Feed, a network of Twitter users tying to help each other avoid traffic backups and accidents faster than some official city transportations systems are able to update.

The system works by having users follow a Twitter bot that in turn follows their direct messages and sorts through the ones including an IATA airport code and incident information. This code designates which city they're posting for and the rest of your message can simply describe what's wrong. … Read more

Better GReader is a young, but not exactly robust, Firefox extension. However, like its sibling Better Gmail, it has a lot of potential. Designed to improve the look, as well as the functionality, of Google Reader, GReader has four skins and four features to get your RSS going.

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A lot of folks have discovered the wonders of going over their monthly SMS allotments because of the alert systems built into popular Web apps like Twitter. But what about getting SMS alerts for other sites, too? A service called Pingie is doing just that, letting you plug in whatever RSS feeds you'd like to keep an eye on (like ours), and sending you a portion of the latest post as an SMS message. The service notes its usefulness for sites like Slickdeals and Woot (two of my personal favorites) as well as news sites for getting the most … Read more

The newly free NewsGator suite has a remarkably powerful set of tools for managing RSS feeds, and without a doubt one of the program's best features is its FeedStation podcast catcher. Fully synchronizable with the Webware version of NewsGator, the Windows version, FeedDemon, comes bundled with FeedStation and preset integration settings for iTunes and Windows Media Player, but not WinAmp.

Laugh all you want at the llama, but the latest WinAmp has an impressive feature set, and is far more flexible than the industry favorite iTunes. However, its podcast manager is clunky and only marginally better than iTunes' native podcatcher, and that's frustrating. Using WinAmp's smart view function, I'll show you how to set its Podcast folder to automatically check for podcasts managed by third-party software.

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Far separate from RSS readers lays the land of news aggregators. One of the more well-known ones is Google News, but there are also social solutions like Newsvine that let the community decide what news items rise to the top based on what's coming over the wire. A new service named Tiinker (that's somewhere in the middle) opened its doors earlier this week. The site's been in private beta since late last year, and can most easily be described as a mix between Google News and StumbleUpon. It's not meant to replace a standard news page … Read more