Recently I wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. I noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What I learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Not to mention new tools worth checking out. So in this more optimistic post, I list 5 reasons why you should continue to use RSS Readers. Sponsor My conclusions in the previous post still stand: 1) Google now dominates what's left of the RSS Reader market; and 2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009/2010 due to Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, Firefox bookmarks, and more. However, a lot of commenters wrote that they still use RSS Readers each and every day. Here are the main reasons why: 1. Control over Information Flow RSS Readers allow users to control their flow of information , whereas it's impossible to keep up with the Twitter firehose of real-time information. Mathew Ballad (comment 11) put it well: "I tend to check Google Reader multiple times a day. While I do keep up with bigger news through Friendfeed or Twitter. I like to keep up with multiple Graphic Design blogs, tech blogs, entertainment blogs, photography blogs and Apple blogs on my own. I just can't see myself ditching RSS Readers for something that I really don't have much control over." It's not just about controlling your stream of daily news. Many people have feeds that they just don't want to miss. Tim Bray has a folder of feeds in NetNewsWire that he feels is "unacceptable when I don't at least glance at everything those people have to say." Some people would argue that it's a thankless task trying to control your RSS Reader. I am one of those people who long ago gave up trying to keep my "mark all read" count at zero. Indeed I don't even try to mark as read my email nowadays (I just let it all flow in and I mark the ones I should reply to with stars, in Gmail). On a similar point, RSS pioneer Dave Winer remarked (comment 80) that Google Reader "has the wrong view of RSS." In a follow-up post , he wrote that "fundamentally, Google Reader views RSS as email," by which I think he means users feel compelled to read everything in it. His view is that "reading every story is a meaningless concept" and that RSS Readers need to find a way around this issue. 2. Evolving User Interfaces Some readers are expecting RSS Readers to transform their UIs in 2010, in particular for "processing life and news streams in the same interface." ( Marco A Torres ) This has already happened to a degree in Google Reader, which has many nice social sharing features. @businessquests (comment 57) called Google Reader "a monitoring and intelligence tool enabled by tagging and publication of tag-based RSS feeds." Eric (comment 19) agreed, commenting: "I use it [Google Reader] not only as a constantly evolving newspaper, but to share and to create new snippets using the "Note in Reader..." bookmarklet. I also subscribe to others' interests and see what they have marked to share with me." Eric also noted that he gets breaking news in Google Reader, thanks to its support of the real-time standard PubSubHubbub. However a number of people complained that Google Reader isn't evolving fast enough in terms of user experience. I would put myself in that camp too. So, like me, you may want to check out some new feed reading innovations. Feedly (one of our Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 ), Fever (one of our Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009 ) and my6sense (an iPhone app - our review ) are 3 apps that received multiple mentions from our readers. We use Fever internally at ReadWriteWeb and I just today downloaded my6sense onto my iPhone. As an aside, note that two of those apps (Feedly and my6sense) integrate Twitter as well as RSS feeds. 3. Tracking Twitter It's not necessarily an either/or situation between RSS Readers and Twitter. Lynne Pope from New Zealand pointed out (comment 44) that she uses Google Reader to track some Twitter accounts: "Time zone differences mean a lot of good information can be missed in a tweet stream. Pulling the important streams into a reader means the information is readily available." 4. Mobile News A number of people remarked that they commonly read their feeds via a mobile version of an RSS Reader. Something for those of us who are sick of being tied to PCs to do more of, perhaps. Bill (comment 46) wrote: "I use NewsRob on Android to pull the most recent 250 articles from Google Reader via my home wifi. Then I walk out the door and head for the commuter train, where I will read my feeds while other poor souls are stuck with the newspaper. Same on the way home and late at night when I'm rocking the baby to sleep." 5. Categorized News Perhaps some of us are finding RSS Readers difficult to use nowadays because we don't use them efficiently. If you spend some initial time setting up your Reader and categorizing your feeds, then chances are you will get a lot more out of it. Randy Orrison (comment 78) described a good use case that you may want to emulate: "I have folders in Google Reader for the blogs that I check every day, new release feeds for software I use (I could never remember to check all 20+ websites regularly), and down at the bottom of the folder list feeds from busy aggregators (like TechMeme) and news sites (like the BBC)." Conclusion Reading through all 160+ comments on my post restored some of my faith in RSS Readers. Viva la read/write Web! I'm going to test out some of the tools people suggested, find new ways to integrate Twitter streams with my RSS feeds, read more on my iPhone using my6sense and other services, and do some re-ordering in my Google Reader. What are your thoughts now about RSS Readers, given the discussion summarized here? Discuss

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5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock

Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest. Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Works With Just About Anything We'll use the field of Education as our example, because there is a lot of activity there and we presume we've got more educators as readers here than butchers or candlestick makers. These methods can be applied to discovering the hottest people and topics in social media in any field, though. If you doubt that these kinds of steps could help in your line of work - check out this post , where we found the best work-related RSS feeds for Fire Inspectors and Physical Therapists, just to prove that we could. In the following 13 steps, we'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post. No end of variations are possible, of course, on this method - but we expect a lot of readers will find this useful. People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to "join the conversation" - because they aren't sure where to find the conversation. Here's how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn't a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it's a good place to start from. Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow. Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you're looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post . Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order - the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both "blog" and "teaching" will appear first. In the image above you can see that we're running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity . Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes. . These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity. So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both "blog" and "teaching." We tried words other words like "education" as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two. Add The Feeds to a Reader We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it's easy. Click on "add items" then "add feed" and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn't matter which one you choose. We pick "RSS 2.0" just because it's the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources. We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their "blogrolls" or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes. Once you've got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes "tab" it's time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there's more that we're going to do with these blogs. When you're in the "add feed" screen, you'll see an "OPML Export" link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It's really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We're now going to edit an OPML file - but don't be scared! It's easy, we promise. Anyone can do it. Pull Out Your New Tab's Feeds This step assumes you've using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that's not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step. The Top of the OPML File. Don't delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don't you feel smart? That was really easy though! Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs Now that you've got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You'll need to create an account, and the service doesn't allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that emailmarshall@gmail.com, emailmarshall+1@gmail.com and emailmarshall+2@gmail.com are all different emails - Gmail considers them the same thing? It's true, that's an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that's how you've got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file. Rank the Blog Posts With Robots! Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you'll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they've processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it's been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It's then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed. What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs' own communities of readers. That's valuable information! It's a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you'll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank! If you're interested in the Greatest Hits of Top Education Bloggers, here's the OPML file we built with the feeds we've found so far: Top Education Blogs - Greatest Hits . Just right click and save that link, then upload it to your feed reader. Banish Content Overload By selecting all the feeds in your collection, then setting their filter to "great" - you'll be shown just the hottest posts from each blog. Selecting "best" will show you almost nothing at all, though. Once you've set the filter to Great, export this filtered version of your OPML file and move on to the next step! Pretty Up Your Collection We would recommend opening this new OPML file in your text editor and renaming it something more useful. Check Out the Hotness By clicking on any of the feeds you imported into Postrank, you can check out the hottest posts in that blog's recent history. Hello time saver! Some of you might be temped to call it a day at this point, and we have captured a lot of good intelligence with relatively little work - but don't stop now, there's more we can do! You'll want to take these next steps, too. Import Into a Feed Reader Go back to your Netvibes or other reader's "add a feed" page and you'll see the option to import an OPML file. Import your new Postrank.com filtered OPML file and you'll be subscribed to just the hottest posts from the best blogs in your field of interest. Oh but there's still more we can do! Make a List of the Links You Found There's a number of different ways you can do this, you could have made a separate list of your links before you subscribed to their feeds, but I didn't in this example. Instead I went into Netvibes, clicked on the title of each blog and copied its home page URL over to a list in a text editor. Why do you want this list of links? Check out the next step. Make a Reference Search Engine! Google Custom Search Engine is really easy to use and is an incredibly powerful tool. Just paste the list of all your top sources in your field into the box on the page, save it, then bookmark the URL of the resulting search engine. Now any time you want to look real smart on a topic in education, you can just search for keywords in your Top Education Blogs Custom Search Engine. We have a lot of different Custom Search Engines that we use here at ReadWriteWeb. Want to see what the results look like? Here's the Custom Search Engine we've got so far for Top Education Blogs .

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How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic

It's one thing to have resolutions for the new year. I, for example, plan to lose weight, learn Python and design the perfect handbag. But since nothing satisfies like the quick achievement of a short-term goal, here are eight things every good nerd needs to to before the ball drops later this week. These tasks comprise a quick to-do list that will leave you feeling competent and prepared for the decade that approaches. Also, you can play the condescension chip and start chiding friends who haven't checked off these items yet. Sponsor 1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships. Facebook's maelstrom-causing privacy changes have given quite a few of us a head-scratching good time trying to figure out just how much of our private lives are to be made public. Before the new year begins, take a look at your settings on sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal and any other places you might be sharing personal content to make sure what you display is consistent with the public image you want to project. As more recruiters and employers hit the web in search of info on individuals, it's becoming ever more important to monitor and control our own identities. If you look back to the origin dates of some of your accounts, you might be surprised at what you thought was appropriate to share online in 2005. Also, while considering what's private and public, take time to evaluate what a "friend," "contact" or "follower" means to you and what types of information you share with different groups. 2. Change your passwords. Safety first, friends. Social web security threats in 2009 were sweeping and surprised more than a few users with spam DMs, hacked accounts and malware of all kinds. Check out the password management tools recommended by a recently high-profile hacker (scroll to the last few paragraphs); for free or cheap, they'll help you generate strong, random passwords and manage them from your computer. 3. Own your name. I've conducted many a web search on many a professional geek this year, and I've been disappointed by how few of us have staked a meaningful claim to our online identities. If you haven't already, buy a URL - preferably one that relates to the name you use professionally - and make friends with Google. If you don't show up in the first results when you search for your name, get a crash course in SEO and ask friends to link to you. It's good for your social life and your career if you seize the opportunity to tell the searching world about yourself rather than relegating that responsibility to LinkedIn, Facebook or some weirdo with the same name as you. 4. Prune your feeds. When going through your RSS feeds, do you find yourself impatiently scrolling more than you're intently skimming? Is your list of unread items becoming unmanagable? The end of the year is a perfect time to get rid of the content you're not reading and group the stuff you are. Take some time this week to organize, delete and add feeds, thereby optimizing your feed-reading experience. Try tools such as NetNewsWire's "dinosaurs" and "least attenion" features that weed out unread or dormant feeds, and consider implementing tools such as Lazyfeed or Guzzle.it that can bring relevant results from fresh sources. And make sure the feeds you own are easy for others to find, too. 5. Find a better mobile. If you don't have a smartphone already, chances are you'll desperately need one next year. And if you already have one, think long and hard about whether you're happy with your service, network and interface. While you might not be able to run out and buy your dream device before 2010 rolls around, visit a few retailers, read some reviews and have your eye on a good mobile to purchase next year. Mobile tech keeps on booming, and you'll want to ensure a frustration-free year as new apps and OSes roll out. 6. Update copyright notices on your website. Here's a simple, obvious and necessary reminder. Does your website currently claim a copyright year of 2007? While it doesn't put you on the foul side of the law, it does look a bit silly as we head into a new decade. The Next Web has a good bit of dynamic code for site owners. 7. Revisit your blog. That poor, neglected old beast might be long overdue for a design facelift, a blogroll refresh or even just a few new posts. While you're at it, why not set automatic reminders to periodically bug you about posting in the new year? On a more mission-critical note, you'll also want to make sure you're using the most updated version of your CMS; not doing so can can lead to problems from broken plugins to getting hacked . And while you're at it, the year's end might also be a good time to consider switching up your CMS service altogether. 8. Back up your data. Hacks and hardware failures happen. Before 2010, make sure as much of your data as possible is protected. From calendars and contacts to blog posts and work projects, more and more of us are relying on networks of servers and startups to keep us running. So, now might be a good time to download and back up files of LinkedIn contacts and WordPress posts - anything that's valuable to you and portable. Think of it this way: You - or at least parts of you - live in the Internet. If the Internet caught on fire, what would you grab to carry with you out of the blaze? We hope this list helps you all get a few housekeeping items squared away in time for a great New Year's Eve filled with peace of mind and a smug sense of superiority over your fellow nerds. If you can think of any must-do year-end tasks, please let us know in the comments! Discuss

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8 Things Every Geek Needs to Do Before 2010

One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to. I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me. Frankly I'm more likely to use Google Reader to search for specific information nowadays, than to scan my subscribed feeds for their latest posts [I should note however that our news writers use a variety of RSS Readers daily]. So what's happened to RSS Readers. Do people still use them and is there still a viable market for them? Sponsor In February 2007 we reported on the state of the RSS Reader market, based on statistics from Feedburner and Pheedo. At that point Google had 59% market share amongst web-based RSS Readers, followed by Bloglines with 33%, then Newsgator and Netvibes with 3% (note: this didn't count Newsgator's desktop apps, like FeedDemon). Pheedo's stats in February 2007 were somewhat different: Newsgator Online had 27% share, followed by MyYahoo! with 20%, Blogines 19% and Google Reader 13%. The first time ReadWriteWeb looked into market share for RSS Readers was 5 years ago, in December 2004 . At that point, very early in the web 2.0 era, Bloglines was the clear leader and Google Reader wasn't even a glint in the milkman's eye. 2009 Update on RSS Reader Market Well, unfortunately Feedburner no longer publishes any useful data about RSS Readers. The product has been infrequently updated since Google acquired it in June 2007 and it no longer even has a proper blog (a Google blog called Adsense For Feeds was the closest I could find). Pheedo also has gone quiet from a blogging perspective - its last blog post was January 2009. Tellingly though, it has an active Twitter account . The best data we have then is ReadWriteWeb's own Feedburner account. Here is the top 10 for Dec 09: 1. Google Feedfetcher 85665 (includes both Google Reader and its start page iGoogle) 2. Bloglines 38797 3. Netvibes 34894 4. FriendFeed 16269 5. NewsGator Online 6753 6. Firefox Live Bookmarks 2999 7. PostRank 2454 8. Windows RSS Platform 1587 9. Mac OS X RSS Reader 1307 10. Zhuaxia 1127 (a Chinese RSS Reader) Feedburner's numbers always need to be taken with a large grain of salt, nevertheless we can see that Google is now over twice the number of Bloglines. There's little sign of life on Bloglines' blog either and its Compete.com traffic numbers show a decline since June 2009 . Netvibes, FriendFeed, Newsgator and PostRank are the only other english language competitors showing in our Feedburner numbers. The others are either browser (Firefox) or operating system readers. Also note that Newsgator shut down its online RSS Reader at the end of July this year. Conclusion: Google Dominates, RSS Readers Less Relevant These statistics are by no means the definitive RSS Reader market numbers. They do clearly show two things though: 1) Google now dominates what's left of the RSS Reader market. Bloglines is hanging in there, but it seems like it's given up the fight judging by lack of activity in its blog and traffic dips. 2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009. People can monitor news and information via Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, their Firefox bookmarks, their OS, aggregators like Techmeme, and so on. Tell us in the comments how you currently read your RSS feeds and how often you check them in an RSS Reader - if indeed you still use one... Discuss

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RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline

In late November, ReadWriteWeb asked the question, Wasabi beta . As of today the service will go live to the public with CEO Freddy Mini's presentation at the Le Web conference. Sponsor In addition to a number of magazine-style themes, some of the features designed for the real-time web include: Multipurpose Navigation : Users will enjoy the ability to read their feeds and insert widgets directly into the Wasabi home page Smart Reader : In addition to delivering users' RSS feeds, Netvibes Smart Reader lets users check their Twitter, Facebook, widget apps, notifications, podcast subscriptions, photos and notifications. The Real-Time RSS: As promised, Netvibes' feed delivery engine updates with full PubSubHubBub support. Publishing : In addition to being able to create more than 185,000 widgets, users can take advantage of the site's no-code push publishing and notification tools as well as free hosting. The company's premium product also allows users to monitor real-time brand conversations. Drag and Follow Widgets : Facebook, Twitter and MySpace widgets allow users to drag hashtags or usernames out of existing widgets in order to instantly create new specialized ones. To test the product visit netvibes.com . Discuss

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Netvibes Launches Ultimate News and Lifestyle Dashboard

Sugar CRM is opening its platform for better third-party web integration with LinkedIn, Jigsaw and Hoovers through a service they are calling Cloud Connects. The service is part of a broad upgrade launched today that includes features similar to Salesforce.com's newest offerings. New features include social feeds that provide statuses, alerts and notifications similar to the functionality found in social networks such as Facebook. An improved mobile service gives users a more streamlined experience when out on the road. Sponsor Sugar CRM is a competitor to Salesforce.com , which launched Salesforce Chatter last month. Salesforce Chatter is a real-time, social network for the enterprise that integrates with third-party applications. The new features in Sugar CRM 5.5 are by no means groundbreaking, as a number of companies offer varying flavors of real-time technologies and third-party integrations. But Sugar's features do offer a comprehensive upgrade that give it more leverage in the market. Cloud Connectors may be the most significant upgrade. It uses web services to connect third-party services such as LinkedIn, which allows users to receive the most up-to-date account and lead information. It reminds us of the new cloud service launched by MindTouch , which

Cliqset is a Florida-based technology startup that end-users have had a hard time understanding. The company just released a new product that developers should have no trouble with at all and that could send waves of innovation across the social web. Called Cliqset FeedProxy , the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that's compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format. Sponsor That means activities from all those services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works. The most common analogy for explaining the impact of data standards is the history of the railroads in the US. When all the railroad networks adopted a standard size of track, then transport companies could carry goods cross-country over multiple rail networks. That opened up a new world of commerce. ActivityStreams is an Atom feed standard under development by many social web companies large and small. It aims to normalize the language that user activities are expressed in across multiple social networks. It's intended to facilitate interoperability and cross-network delivery of user activity payloads. It's important, exciting and inspiring work. Non-standardized activity feed publishing is like creating a high-way that only one brand of car can drive on, with one proscribed type of journey in mind. Standardized feed publishing provides a platform for a world of open innovation. This API enables user data to pass freely from one network to another or through multiple applications, unhindered by network-specific markup and namespaces. Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don't. As we explained in the ReadWriteWeb research report The Real-Time Web and its Future : An extension of the Atom feed format, the spec explains it like this: "An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities." In the current draft spec, you can perform such actions as Post, Share, Save, Mark as Favorite, Play, Start Following, Make Friend, Join and Tag Object. An Object could be an Article, Blog Entry, Note, File, Photo, Photo Album, Playlist, Video, Audio, Bookmark, Person, Group, Place or Comment. These actions can have such contexts as Location, Mood and Annotation. Stream aggregator Cliqset publishes Activity Streams feeds that don't require API authentication to view. You can see a sample one at: http://cliqset.com/feed/atom?uid=dbounds. The aim of Activity Streams is to have multiple social networks use a common language and have a common understanding of what all those things mean, so that messages can be read across different networking sites. Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used - but it's an important step none the less. What does this mean? It means that applications developers could build interfaces to display books read, music listened to, reviews written and more across multiple different services with as much ease as they can display standard RSS or Atom feeds today. It's a powerful new level of granularity. Social media center Boxee and a Sun Microsystems community product currently consume activity feeds. Cliqset says many more projects are in development now. As the ActivityStreams community builds out more sophistication in the standard, there may be things like cross-site reputation included in such feeds. Cliqset has done a valuable service creating these normalized feeds for developers, but the obvious downside is the reliance on a middleman. Cliqset says it is talking to Superfeedr about creating some real-time feeds as well. That would be great, but would be another layer on top of existing publisher feeds. Perhaps if the developer community builds the kind of market-moving applications and features ActivityStreams advocates expect from the Cliqset feets, more publishers will begin publishing standardized feeds natively. While Cliqset has put a lot of work into normalizing numerous network feeds, the idea behind standards is that they can facilitate technical integration between parties with no prior knowledge of each other. Either way, Cliqset is putting the ActivityStreams agenda to the test. The company's release could have some very significant consequences. Discuss

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The Day The Highway Went Coast-to-Coast: 70+ SocNet Feeds Normalized by New API