Webware

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 friends list have) and the custom friends lists that Facebook started letting members create last year.

That's useful. If you've gone to the trouble to create a custom friend grouping for your family members, for example, you can now filter your News Feed to keep tabs on what they're up to. I don't think I'll be filtering by Bumper Sticker updates anytime soon, but sorting to keep tabs on my high-school classmates would certainly be worthwhile. And totally not creepy at all.

The New York Times is bringing its e-reader desktop application to the Mac this month. The newspaper publisher unveiled its latest efforts last night, with a slew of screenshots. The Times' First Look post notes that the application will be running on Microsoft's Silverlight technology, enabling rich-media effects and rendering. Users will be able to read, browse, and search the entire publication while offline.

The big difference between the PC application and the Mac version will be the ability to view pages in three different sizes, all of which have been crunched on the company's servers instead of on people's machines. Mac users will also be able to do a text search with an index of the last seven days' worth of news, while PC users are currently limited to just one day's worth.

PC users will still have the leg up on Mac users for a few features, including Pictures of the Day, which Rob Larson, vice president of digital production for the Times' Web site, says has been quite popular on the PC side.

The company will be offering the new Reader to Mac users free of charge over the "beta" test period. After that, it will assume a similar role to the PC version, which gives access only to people who are current physical subscribers, or who have subscribed to the paper's digital editions. The software is expected to ship in the next two weeks.

Mac users will soon be able to enjoy reading The New York Times while offline with the company's upcoming Reader product.

(Credit: The New York Times)

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 by any means, but instead is designed to let you whittle down what types of stories you like in order to get future recommendations that are similar. The ones you mark as not liking, Tiinker will simply get rid of.

Everything on the site is handled with three basic controls, a thumbs up and down button, and a way to bookmark content that goes into a separate feed that you can share with others. The service will also keep track of which stories you've marked as liking, so you can go back and read them later. In order to abate users limiting themselves to just a few types of content, there's also a "lucky" dip section, which chooses a story that's outside of your taste.

The ultimate goal of this and services like Spotback are to help you get a news feed that's been hand-tailored to your preferences so that the only stories you'll see are ones you're interested in. Of course what makes that part critical is the source list, which is where Tiinker's a little short-sighted. There are many good sources that articles seem to pop up from, but there's no way to go in and "tinker" the complete list to see what's on it or add new, independent sources. This is mostly because of the machine learning system that's set up to balance the tastes of the entire user base, but it's a bummer when you're in the dark about where the content is coming from. Interestingly enough, up until last month the service had a built-in RSS reader that let you do such a thing, but it was pulled down for retooling.

I like the idea of Tiinker, although it's not useful to me for news or content suggestions as I'm an RSS enthusiast who reads a lot of social news sites. It's definitely a handy way to get a smattering of new feeds and story suggestions, and the machine learning concept shows promise, but until they give a little more control over where the content is coming from, advanced users will likely want to stick to a social news service or feed aggregator like Feed Each Other, and still private Streamy to get interesting news links from humans.

Tiinker pulls in news from a variety of sources. Pick the ones you like, and it will do its best to find you more that are similar.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Facebook has several layers of functionality that make it worth using, but my favorite is the once-controversial news feed. Why? I simply don't have time to check each of my friend's profiles for what's new, and the feed does a pretty great job at that without all the legwork or annoying e-mail notifications. FriendFeed is a new service that takes the idea of a news feed and extends it beyond the social network into other social services you're a part of. There are more than 20 to pick and choose from, including social news services like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, along with microblogs like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.

Keep track of all the feeds for all your friends with FriendFeed.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

By adding all these services to your FriendFeed, you're essentially creating another social networking profile--but this is a little different. It's almost like a digital identity, or your very own "about" page of services you use. Others can then easily subscribe to your FriendFeed and get the benefit of all of your online activity in one place. Likewise you can subscribe to theirs with one click, and track all the online activity they've made publicly available.

So what's the big deal about this service? It's really not a new idea--other services like Readr, Spokeo, Jaiku (which is incidentally one of the included feeds) let you do this with all sorts of social feeds, and 8hands, which we looked at back in late April, does it on your desktop with IM to boot. There's also the recently launched Plaxo Pulse (review), which adds some contact management into the mix as well. So to answer my original question, the most exciting part is the group of folks behind it, which consists of four ex-Google employees who have worked on big projects like Google Maps, Groups, and Gmail. That and it's super simple to use--you just need to copy and paste a few URLs, and plug in your username.

For widget junkies, there are two ways to extend your FriendFeed master feed to other platforms, including a Facebook app (which beats installing apps for each social service), along with a Javascript version you can embed on any old blog or Web site.

The service is in private beta with plans to open up to everyone in the "next month or so."