It’s easy to understand why URL-shortening tools such as TinyURL and bit.ly are popular on the social web. For web workers, the ability to quickly absorb, organize, package, and redistribute information is a critical and demanding task. BurnURL, a new service produced by ReadBurner (first mentioned here, and currently awaiting relaunch), seeks to add value to this process by making it easy to allow people you’re sharing with to do additional sharing.

It’s a matter of reducing the steps to the bare minimum in order to allow a piece of content to “go viral.” BurnURL does its part by with something called the “ShareBar.”

BurnURLs are created in the same way as other URL-shortening tools. Head to BurnURL.com, or grab the bookmarklet so it’s a simple one-click operation, enter the URL, “burn” it, and you’re provided with the shortened URL (for example, here’s the link to the announcement on the Official Readburner Blog: http://burnurl.com/ejwnvF) so that you’re set to fire off the BurnURL via Twitter, e-mail, instant message, and so on.

The real power of this tool presents itself when you click a BurnURL and find the ShareBar that runs at the top of the destination page. While services like Adjix and Linkbee use a header space on destination pages to run ads, BurnURL carves out a social media and redistribution area that has the potential to be highly effective for web workers.

Front and center at the top of the screen is a share area that easily allows recipients of the BurnURL to reshare the web page that they’re using via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. I’d like to see BurnURL expand this area to aid people who use such tools as Yammer, an enterprise version of Twitter that includes task management tools, and ididwork. Again, the ability to quickly and efficiently find important content and then pass it along to colleagues and clients (who then, in turn, are empowered to do the same) is a powerful web utility. It would be especially interesting and useful to see a simple “Shared” meter, noting the number of times a web page has been “burned.”

That said, we are told how many “hits” a page has received, which I presume to mean the number of click throughs an individual instance of a unique BurnURL has received. It would be all the more useful to be able to see this number, as well as the aggregate number of views that the page has received through the total number of instances in which a web page has been burned and shared.

There’s also a really simple ability to vote a BurnURL page up or down, which helps to tally the percentage of people who “liked” the page. Again, I’d love to be able to see the individual page statistics vs. the aggregate here.

But even as it stands, this tool provides a strong means for organizations of all kinds to track data usage. For example, I can find an online article, burn it, share it on Twitter with a note saying, “What do y’all think, vote up if you like it.” Then later in the day I can check back to see how many people visited the story via the BurnURL link, and the percentage of them that liked it. This is pretty powerful stuff in terms of the lightning-fast ability to distribute content on the web and receive feedback in real time.

And finally, if I may add one more item to my BurnURL wish list: Google Reader-style “share note” comments, which would allow people to leave short notes on web pages that can be added to as they are redistributed.

What URL shortening services do you use?

To that end, when Adam Ostrow of Mashable and Readburner mentioned a social media fantasy football league for charity, I was all over it. I wasn’t the only one. One thing I love about the people of social media: most of us really want …
uptownuncorked.com

Back in the end of 2007, half a year after Google Reader had launched the sharing feature, I had an idea of a new service that would aggregate all the shared items and sort them according to the number of times one post was shared.

As it usually happens with the new ideas, somebody else had it too, and, most importantly, made it real before I had even started coding (actually, I had, but just a few lines). In a short while, a second similar aggregator appeared and, today, we are fortunate to have ReadBurner and RssMeme.

The two services, both dear to me,  have a lot in common with one notable exception: RssMeme employs a kind of spider to find and aggregate shared items  while ReadBurner is an opt in service.

In due course, other feed readers were added as sources: Bloglines, Netvibes, Newgator etc. and RssMeme went  a bit further querying known services to find out whether an article had been bookmarked in any way.

The idea that what one shares through his feed reader is actually a vote or a recommendation is pretty solid, and, once a big number of sharers is reached, the power of statistics comes to play: the articles that emerge to the top are the ones that people truly feel are important. Isn’t this the essence of social bookmarking? And isn’t it also true that this essence is actually gamed in the digg like sites by a rather small group of people, despite the huge influx of traffic these sites enjoy?

One short  visit to Readburner or RssMeme reveals though, that the articles that rise to the top, have been shared by such a small number of people that, with  equal diggs, they would never see the light of day in digg.

Which leads to the conclusion that either the people who share are not that many, or they have not been included in the two aggregators yet.

Speaking of numbers, how many people really use Google Reader? I tried to google the question but came with no answer. I tried to google also the ‘google reader market share’, but came with no recent data either.

Without an idea of how many people use feed readers and share, it is  pretty hard to make any predictions or recommendations. Yet, if we assume that it is only because it is too early  (less than a year) that the sharing culture hasn’t spread and that it, eventually, will, we can fantasize one implication:

Some clever engineer will think of incorporating the share-votes into digg: a little bit of matching (is the sharer a digg user, and has the shared post been dugg already etc) and there you go.

But would that be a good thing?

Yes, it would. Because it would instill the democratic element of Readburner/RssMeme into digg. And, democracy is a good thing, isn’t it?

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• A Directory of Google Reader Shared Pages?
• Google Reader comes to its sharing senses, lets users pick friends

This is not a how to blog, but, as it is still under construction, I will blog about all the little tricks I apply here, that might have some use for the rest of the wordpress.com folks.

Here is a little nice one.

Problem:

Readburner is a service that aggregates all blogposts shared in NewsGator Online, Google Reader and Netvibes.

By counting the number of shares, it creates a popularity list. In effect, this is a truly democratical social bookmarking system, without the hickups of Digg and its likes.

Readburner provides its users with some nice widgets in the form of little chicklets, that display essential statistical measures.

The chicklets come in three flavors:

• Item of a specific user (i.e. his share page) registed with Readburner.
• Items authored by someone.
• Items of a specific source (say, a blog with many authors).

Readburner provides some javascript code that allows anyone to generate the chicklets for his part.

Now, I wanted to put such a readburner chicklet in my sidebar, but I stumbled on the usual wordpress.com problem: no javascript allowed.

Solution:

Since javascript is not allowed, we have to find a way of displaying the chicklet through pure html.

Let’s see what a chicklet is composed of:

• an image (the colored rectangle of the chicklet)
• a number (the counted items)
• a link (the link to the relevant page in readburner)

As a matter of fact, the number is in the image, so we have to find just two things: the image url and the link url.

• User.

( The number here is my number from the google reader shared items url http://www.google.com/reader/shared/11232096483858520222.

You have to figure out yours, and replace this one):

The required urls are of the following type:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?user=11232096483858520222

Link: http://readburner.com/u/11232096483858520222

and the actual html code should be:

<a href=”http://readburner.com/u/11232096483858520222″  target=”_blank” title=”">

<img src=”http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?user=11232096483858520222″ alt=”"/>

</a>

which produces:

• Author:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?author=Nikos%20Anagnostou

Link: http://readburner.com/u/Nikos Anagnostou

and the actual html code should be:

<a href=”http://readburner.com/u/Nikos Anagnostou” target=”_blank” title=”">

<img src=”http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?author=Nikos%20Anagnostou” alt=”"/>

</a>

which produces:

• Source:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?source=webtropic

Link: http://readburner.com/source/webtropic

and the actual html code should be:

<a href=”http://readburner.com/source/webtropic” target=”_blank” title=”">

<img src=”http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?source=webtropic” alt=”"/>

</a>

which produces:

To figure out the proper links for yourselves, first of course you have to add your shared items url in readburner. Then replace your name, blog name or user id in the above code and paste it in a text widget in wordpress.

As I said, I am using Google Reader. The other services might have some slight variations in the url schemes, I did not bother to check. Please do for yourselves.

Good luck and ..happy sharing!

I’m curious about the level of interaction that occurs around the different content that streams through FriendFeed. Distributed conversations are fine by me, and I wonder what sparks them most often for content. So I did a little analysis of the ‘likes’ and comments that have happened for me.

Below are some pie charts. The first set analyze the ‘likes’. To the left is the percentage of my FriendFeed stream that comes from different content sources. To the right, I counted the number of ‘likes’ for the various content sources. For the ‘likes’ I only counted for the month of May, but I think it’s a decent approximation of my overall activity.

A couple observations:

• Blog posts and FriendFeed Direct Posts are the biggest sources of ‘likes’
• Google Reader shares and Twitter are a big part of my stream, but don’t generate a comparable percent of ‘likes’

Now let’s see how the comments look:

Would you look at that? FriendFeed direct posts dominate the comments. My blog posts are #2.

What’s It Mean?

I imagine everyone’s experience will vary. For me, I draw four conclusions.

My FriendFeed use is similar to people who Twitter: With FriendFeed direct posts, I’ll sometimes just make an observation. Other times, I direct post a website, generally with a graphic. This strikes me as similar to Twitter in that I’m posting something that can be consumed by anyone who subscribes to me. Also, these posts mean someone can stay within FriendFeed. Seems to make a difference in interaction when people can stay on the site. Like Twitter.

‘Likes’ dominate my blog posts: The Likes:Comments ratio for my blog posts is running at 4:1. For all the concern about fractured comments, I’d say people are overlooking basic recommendations of your content via ‘likes’. It’s not about the comments, it’s about the ‘likes’!

Comments on my posts frequently occur on someone else’s stream: There are several of my blog posts that have generated good comments. They just haven’t occurred on the RSS feed from my blog. These bigger comment fests have been when someone with much larger following and FriendFeed ‘presence’ (and I’m not going to write his name, because I use it too often…). But you know what? I’ll take those comments! They obviously weren’t happening just off my own post. In the long run that kind of exposure is vital for us smaller bloggers.

Google Reader shares suffer from repetition: Good blog posts will often be shared by several FriendFeed members, including those with larger followings. So when I share, I may be following others. So the repetition diminishes the interaction. I still share – there is some interaction. And Google Reader shares end up in several other places, like RSSmeme and ReadBurner. These services will show the most popular shares, so I want to vote for these blog posts.

Final Thoughts

Colin Walker has some interesting thoughts about using FriendFeed as a blogging platform. Looking at how FriendFeed Direct Posts and my blog generate the biggest activity, maybe he’s on to something.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22analyzing+my+friendfeed+stats%22&public=1

اگر با سرویس FriendFeed آشنایی ندارید پیشنهاد می کنم قبل از مطالعه اینجا را بخوانید.

یکی از بهترین راههای وبگردی چیزی نیست جز استفاده از ابزارآلاتی که مطالب موردعلاقه کاربران را دسته بندی می کنند. نمونه این را قبلا در ReadBurner شاهد بودیم. ریدبرنر سایتی بود که به آنالیز لینکهای Share در Google Reader می پرداخت و یکی از بهترین دست آوردهای این کار این بود که می شد به جای خواندن لینکهای Share شده دوستان لینکهای بیشتر شیر شده را در این سرویس خواند.  

سرویسی که امروز می خواهیم با نام فرندفید لینک درباره آن با هم صحبت کنیم سرویسی است که همین کار ReadBurner را برای Friend Feed می کند. به این معنا که لینکهای بیشتر به اشتراک گذاشته در فرندفید را جمع آوری می کند. اما این سرویس یک اشکال هم دارد. در آن نمی توان لینکی به زبانی غیر از فارسی یافت!

هنوز این سرویس در مراحل بسیار ابتدایی به سر می برد. اما می توان به آن امیدوار بود. و باید هم امیدوار بود زیرا این سرویس یک پله دیگر نسبت به Read Burner به وب3 نزدیکتر است.

فرض کنید این سرویس بخش فارسی خود را راه اندازی کند. آنگاه شما نوشته بیشتر به اشتراک گذاشته را در ریدبرنر می بینید. فقط نوشته های بیشتر به اشتراک گذارده شده! اما در این سرویس می توانید از بین همه محتواهایی که در فرندفید به چشم می خورد اعم از تصاویر و گوگل ریدرهای شیر و خلاصه همه چیز که بیشتر مورد توجه کاربران فارسی زبان بوده است به گشت و گذار بپردازید.

طبیعی است اولا گوگل ریدرهای بیشتر شیر شده نسبت به ریدبرنر شانس بیشتری برای نمایش دارند و در حقیقت رقابت برای بیشتر دیده شدن با ورود محتواهای دیگر کمی سخت می شود.

دوما همین محتواهای بیشتر را می توانید در این سایت دریابید. ایده این سایت می تواند از ریدربرنر بسیار بیشتر رشد کند. البته به نظر من بهتر بود قبلا از رونمایی از این سایت که به نظر امروز انجام شده است امکانات جانبی بیشتری اضافه می شد. البته بعید هم نیست در روزهای آینده اخبار بهتری به دستمان برسد!

پیشنهاد می کنم دنبال کنید فتحی در فرندفید را! و بخوانید برای آشنایی با فرندفید « سرویسی برای زاغ سیاه چوب زنی » را!

مشترک این وبلاگ شوید تا هیچ چیز را از دست ندهید!

I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen the names of a number of aggregation sites out there. It’s a very popular space, and I have not really understood who they were or what made them tick. But my growing enjoyment of FriendFeed made me wonder about what these other sites are up to. So I put together a high level survey of several of them.

There’s a really long table below. Before that, a few notes are in order.

Selected apps: This is by no means an exhaustive list. For instance, I just got into Yokway today, but haven’t had a chance to try it out. I just came up with a list from the serendipitous finds I’ve had. I also focused on earlier stage companies – no Digg, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon.

How stuff gets in there: There are three way that blog posts and news articles are added to these aggregation sites:

• Submit: Users add a specific web page to the site, often via a toolbar ‘add’ button.
• RSS share: Google Reader lets you ’share’ an item in your RSS feeds that you like, posting it to your publicly accessible ’shared items’ page, which is tracked by an aggregation site
• RSS feed: The aggregation site takes a feed of all posts from a blog or news site

What’s interesting: Every site has its own secret sauce for what makes it tick. I tried to find things that seemed to each site apart from others.

Experience: I rate the user experience of these sites based how much was required to use them effectively. In this earlier blog post, I describe examples of light and heavy user experiences. Generally, lighter is better, but heavy can be OK for really good, distinctive features.

The point of this chart: It’s not to praise or bury any of these apps. Just to put together a list of what’s out there. If you’re an information seeker, a writer or seeking social connections with like-minded people, then you should check out some of these sites.

After the chart, I include links to other blogs with more information, plus a few thoughts as well.

Quick thoughts in dot…dot…dot fashion:

Diigo’s people matching based on common bookmarks and tags is a really cool idea, it reminds me of Toluu’s matching based on common blog subscriptions…LinkRiver and Reddit have a very similar philosophy, with Reddit deploying a lot more categorization than LinkRiver….ReadBurner and RSS Meme are also very similar…Shyftr may have a light experience, but I’ll admit I found the overall user experience confusing right now (they’re in beta, it will improve)…Twine’s automatically generated tags for different categories was really interesting, need to explore that more…no notes on FriendFeed, just click ‘FriendFeed’ in my tag cloud for information about it…I kind of like getting my daily Social Median emails with news updates…Blog Rize has a spare UI, but it is strangely compelling…luckily, none of my blog posts have received the ‘lame’ or ‘facts wrong’ ratings on Blog Rize…

Wrapping up, here are some blog posts to get you started on the various apps:

• Diigo: Webware review
• Social Median: Louis Gray review
• Shyftr: Louis Gray review
• BlogRize: ReadWriteWeb review
• Twine: profy.com review
• LinkRiver: SheGeeks review
• Reddit: Soshable review
• ReadBurner: Webware review
• RSS Meme: Louis Gray review

I may be posting about some these sites in the days to come.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/9bdd0ad9-a377-f65d-6140-8dc4e835c6c3

It’s time to write about one of my favourite inventions, ever; Ladies and Gentlemen, the right Honourable RSS! It’s always been at the back of mind to write about RSS, but it just seemed such a vast topic that I kept putting off R-Day. Until ReadWriteWeb rather belatedly reminded me that May 1st was actually RSS Awareness Day- aagh! I feel that I’ve let my trusty friend down by not celebrating- I mean stuff workers’ rights, this is far more important…

Anyway, I’m going to start with one of my pet RSS projects, because if ever I needed help with a project, it was this one. No yahoo pipes-esque inspiration yet, and I’ve been working on this for a lot longer… In a nutshell, the library is getting cut; people think everything is on google, no-one knows who those folk in specs and dowdy cardigans are anymore, blah blah blah. It’s hardly ground breaking news. So, we at the library make the obvious connection and decide that we need to start reaching out to people rather than wait for them to come to us. One of the librarians, who has been there for eons, states that in the past, when she received interesting emails she used to send them to interested people, a la SDI. Did they teach SDI at library school anymore? I have no idea what SDI is, and am trying to visualise the trusty acronym dictionary in my head in the vain hope that that might help me. It doesn’t. Bearing in mind I had only been at my job for less than two months, I decide to risk a cautious no. Right answer and full explanation ensues. (FYI, it’s Selective Dissemination of Information…right.) So she explains, and RSS immediately springs to mind. I had probably been indulging in some illicit feed reading moments before… Why don’t we start to build this up, with proper distribution lists of interested specialists (as I know about 4 people in the Bank. Knowledge Management indeed) and draw in more content with RSS? Library colleagues were a little hazy about RSS but that led to some ego boosting teaching opportunities and being known as the RSS guru, so it worked well for me… But anyway, this was last July, and I haven’t been able to move on from this basic idea yet. Basically, I set up distribution lists in most wonderful Outlook of joy (…), entitled “Health” or “Environment” for example. I set up RSS feeds for as many different providers who might provide interesting and worthwhile content that our patrons would like to see. I scan Bloglines twice a day, copy, paste and send the information to the patron distribution lists. It works. People are happy as they get new material which has been vetted by a librarian. We’ve expanded the service to include new journals and books. And we’re happy as we’re reaching people for sure, rather than just providing a RSS feed and hoping people sign up.

BUT- its not very cool. It was half cool maybe in 2004, but we’re in 2008. It’s very time consuming. It’s not automated. But I think it could be!! From the SLA listserv, it seems that no-on has much more of an idea than we do. There’re a couple of services: Ozmosys is one fr’instance, but although everyone wanted to know more about services, no-one seemed very happy with any of the solutions.

I’m fairly happy with the basic layer of the service- ie the groups of specialists and the information we’re receiving, though it would be good to expand this. The alerts are very relevant too, as they’re handpicked. Some of the ideas that I have been pondering in order to improve this involve:

• The Specialist Locater that the workplace may eventually crack on with sometime this millennium, (extract the tags/info that people add about themselves and their interests) (more about this later),
• OR somehow tag all the relevant information by publishing it in a blog (Bloglines has this feature to publish, but no tagging, sadly) and then extracting an RSS feed filtered by tag and sending it automatically to the distribution lists. (hmm, in my dreams?! Not sure about presentation issues…)
• OR as yet some other inspired solution!

I’ve been scouring the web for information about similar problems- and will write later about AideRSS, Readburner, and the like. Well, I will when I’ve read about them; the blog is really making me get my thoughts in order which is F.A.B!

I’m sort of late to this story, due to lack of internet connection yesterday, but I’m still happy to see ReadBurner back online. Like in the time when I started the project, the relaunch generated an amazing amount of blog coverage. This is something that really encourages us to keep pushing interesting stuff and I wanna thank all you guys out there.

I also wanna thank the ReadBurner team. The energy and passion they’re putting in is amazing and their future plans are too. Congrats guys!

My personal goal is to end my freelance work till the end of June and after that to jump fully back into the startup world. I will then continue to help out with ReadBurner but I also have plenty of new cool ideas (I recently had to turn down two invitations to YCombinator interviews due to this damn contract work I’m bound to).

Anyway. Have fun with the all new ReadBurner and don’t forget to burn your Linkblog.

Alexander Marktl’s ReadBurner ist eine kleine österreichische Web-Erfolgsgeschichte, die sich vor allem in den USA verbreitet und eine aktive Nutzerbasis etabliert hat. Qoove-Geschäftsführer Alex hat das Projekt in seiner Freizeit gestartet und darf A-List-Newcomer Louis Gray verdanken, dass der Service nicht nur sehr schnell Bekanntheit erlangt hat, sondern auch viel zu schnell gewachsen ist. Am 5. März ist ReadBurner offline gegangen, Alex hatte keine Zeit mehr dafür, am 14. wurde der Verkauf an eine Gruppe rund um Mashable-Redakteur Adam Ostrow angekündigt, am 15. April hat die neue Version gestartet.

Was ist ReadBurner?

ReadBurner analysiert Google Reader Shared Items-Feeds, die von den ReadBurner-Besucher/innen eingetragen werden können. Heraus kommt in etwa eine elitäre Version von Digg. Das “mitstimmen” erfordert nämlich einen Account bei Google Reader und ein Abonnement des Blogs, der ein bestimmtes Thema aufgebracht hat.

Vom Layout erinnert ReadBurner an eine Mischung aus Digg und Techmeme – man sieht, wie viele “Shares” ein Blog-Post erhalten hat (siehe Digg) und sieht rechts eine Liste an populären Posts der letzten Woche (siehe Digg), zu jedem Post werden wenn möglich ähnliche Posts angezeigt (siehe Techmeme).

Problem: Kommentar-Silos

Ein kleines Feature ist es aber, das die US-Blogosphere in den letzten Tagen auf Trab gehalten hat: Integrierte Kommentare mit Disqus. (Disqus ist ein zentraler Kommentar-Service, der in Blogs integriert werden kann und so die Kommentar-Silos aufzubrechen versucht.) Die meisten Blogs ermöglichen auf ihren Blog-Seiten Kommentare, ein wesentlicher Grund, die Blog-Websites überhaupt noch zu besuchen.

Dezentrale Kommentare auf Aggregator-Services erzeugen für die Blogger zwei Probleme:

1. Es wird schwieriger und aufwendiger, den Kommentaren zu einem Blog zu folgen. Digg, ReadBurner, FriendFeed, sie alle bieten Kommentar-Funktionen an, alle in ihren eigenen Silos. (So sehr Disqus nämlich versucht, diese Silos aufzubrechen, bekommen ein Blog-Eintrag bei ReadBurner und im Original-Blog nämlich zwei separate Kommentar-Seiten.) Keine der Seiten ist bisher in der Lage, diese Kommentare an eine zentrale Stelle zurück zu posten. Interessant wäre es, wenn Disqus wenigstens den Aggregatoren erlauben würde, Kommentare zurück zum Original-Post zu schicken, wenn diese Disqus verwenden. FriendFeed könnte die Disqus-API nützen, um das gleiche zu tun.
   Immerhin: Disqus kündigt an, die verschiedenen Kommentar-Stränge zusammenfügen zu wollen.
2. Die Blogs verlieren einen Teil ihrer Besucher/innen. Vor allem kommerzielle Blogs leben aber von Werbeeinschaltungen, vor allem auf ihren Websites. Nur wenige Blogs vermarkten bisher ihre Blogs auch im RSS-Feed. Das Blog-Geschäftsmodell steht erst am Anfang, noch gab es außer Weblogs, Inc. noch keine wesentlichen Exits, niemand weiß, ob es die überhaupt geben wird. Mit der Dezentralisierung der Kommentare wird das noch schwieriger.

Ich bin gespannt, ob ReadBurner diese Diskussion weiter anstacheln wird – ich bin sicher, dass die meisten kommerziellen Blog-Netzwerke (zB Techcrunch, GigaOm, PaidContent, Read/WriteWeb, Mashable oder Silicon Alley Insider) intern heftig diskutieren, wie sie dieser Schwierigkeit begegnen können.

Zu guter Letzt:

• Written by Sebastian Moser
• Shared by Sebastian Moser

Eine Kurz-Übersicht an Neuigkeiten:

1. “Mein” Projekt Presentify hat einen Blog. Das wird eine interessante Sache – die meisten unserer Mitglieder sind keine Google Reader-süchtigen Nerds. Wie wird das als Kommunikationsmittel angenommen? Unter anderem bitten wir um Feedback für Presentify 2.0.
2. WordPress 2.5 ist toll. Der neue Administrations-Bereich ist viel übersichtlicher als früher. Die Jungs von WordPress haben eine tolle Arbeit geleistet. Ich bin übrigens froh, dass mein Blog bei WordPress.com gehostet ist. Da muss ich mich um nichts selbst kümmern!
3. FriendFeed wird immer mehr zum fixen Bestandteil meines Web-Alltags. Es ersetzt für mich Techmeme und ist insofern besser, da ich bei FriendFeed den Teil der “A-List-Blogger” abonniert habe, der mich tatsächlich interessiert und ich zusätzlich meine Freunde dabei hab.
4. Alexander Marktl’s ReadBurner (zur Zeit offline) wurde von einigen Leuten rund um Mashable gekauft und wird zur Zeit einer Generalüberholung unterzogen, bevor der Service wieder online geht. (Interview mit Austrianstartups.com)
5. Mein Blog hat wieder einmal ein neues Design. Das ist eindeutig besser als das alte.

Louis Gray expressed some concerns that the recent ReadBurner acquisition may cause a conflict of interest, since Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief at Mashable, has been involved.

I can tell you one thing, Louis: These guys are really into this RSS sharing thing and love that product. We are currently collecting lots of cool ideas and I’m really looking forward to the re-launch.

From what I’ve seen so far – with this new formed team ReadBurner has more than ever the chance to evolve into a mass appealing web site, mainly based on innovation and (hopefully) with the support of all you bloggers and users out there.

I’m happy to announce that ReadBurner has been acquired and will therefore live on!

The buyers include Adam Ostrow (editor in chief at Mashable), Drew Olanoff (former technology evangelist at Pluggd)  and Eric Kerr (creator of TinyLoad).

Drew and Adam contacted me last week, 1 day after I officially announced to close  ReadBurner. I got tons of mails to keep up the project and also a few requests of people who wanted to acquire ReadBurner. After some email discussions and phone calls, I decided to go with Drew, Adam and Eric because they understand and like the concept of sharing items through Google Reader as much as I do. Moreover they obviously have the skills and the resources to build a compelling web product.

The best part for me: I’m not leaving ReadBurner, they asked me to stay on their board of Advisers! I think ReadBurner now has a real bright future and I’m very excited.

Read the official announcement on Mashable.
Visit ReadBurner

I’m sorry to announce that ReadBurner is no longer availiable.

The reason is that I just don’t have time to keep the site up and running, because of some freelance projects that I cannot drop out.

I really want to thank all of you guys for supporting me, giving me feedback and visiting ReadBurner. It’s been very exiting to run a website that got so much Buzz from the blogosphere in such a short period of time.

If you are still interested in the idea of ReadBurner I suggest you to try out RSSmeme which is a very well done clone of ReadBurner developed by Benjamin Golub.

ReadBurner.com
Just in case somebody is interested in buying the domain ReadBurner.com or the technology, I’m open for offers (it got tons of referals). Contact me: alexander.marktl@gmail.com

Picked this up from ReadBurner (hey another social aggregator), it’s fav.or.it which is integrates commenting with rss “river” feeds. It’s still on closed beta right now, but that’s no reason for you not to pre-register and jump right on the bandwagon once it opens up!

Check out the original article and some screenshots on Mashable.

If you’re deciding between this and FriendFeed which I just blogged about, why not go with both and see which you prefer in the long run? I’ll be uniquefrequency on both.

I’ve been suspecting that Facebook’s been seeing a decline in activity for sometime. Just about half a year ago, the ‘home’ section with updates from my friends would be flooded hourly. Now I can login after 8 hours, and find that almost nothing has changed.

Suspicions have been confirmed with this article from ReadWriteWeb (once again picked up by Readburner, have I convinced you of its usefulness yet?), which says

There are now 15,422 apps on the Facebook platform — how many of them are truly useful? Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the novelty has worn off and users are finally starting to demand more of the applications they install.

The article also has statistics about the number of Facebook app users at their peak, and now:

There have been criticisms of Facebook in recent weeks: Marketing Pilgrim discusses a partnership between Facebook and the Wall Street Journal signalling desperation from either/both parties, and Jaffe Juice #101 has a comment on how disappointing it is that Facebook is not engaging the new media enough moving forward.

Applications are seriously beginning to rub some people the wrong way, and Facebook isn’t exactly providing the innovation that people want,  but I don’t think that’s making people tired of Facebook, or making them want to jump aboard the next new platform when it occurs.

Personally I think even with most apps stripped away, the Facebook interface is still superior to Friendster (for sure), and at least for network externality reasons, more popular here than MySpace. There are statistics to prove that MySpace is still dominant, but given that it never really caught on in Singapore, it’s not that relevant.

It would be great to hear what people here think, and maybe get a general idea of how the social networking scene is like in Singapore, and then publish some thoughts on that. My guess on where it’s going is the more frivolous applications (Grow a plant, hatch an egg?) will slowly die off, and the real social applications like iLike and Feedheads will gain popularity, as users begin to realise that Facebook can and should act not just as a Friendster clone, but a place to share information and interests in one central space.

I woke to four comments today from Mike Reynolds from SquirrelNet and was curious how he stumbled upon the site. He forwarded me an email from a Google Alert on Readburner, which was a feature I hadn’t used before, but I’m definitely going to now. Yet another reason why Readburner is just awesome.

I’ve been up for about an hour, and I’ve already added three new additions to my Google Reader feeds, namely SquirrelNet, MediaShift (thanks to a Feedhead post by Prof. Netzley who shared a great post on How Google & Wiki have changed our lives) and Louisgray.com, referred to by Mike. No wonder it’s taking me longer and longer to check my feeds every day!

Anyway, on Louisgray, there’s an interesting article about AssetBar, which looks like a competitor to Google Reader, with a social element built in. Basically while you can share feeds in Google Reader, you don’t know what someone else might be thinking about it, other than the person liked it enough to share it. AssetBar changes that by allowing users to rate articles and comment on them as well. I haven’t had the time to try it yet, but hopefully I will soon and see if the whole commenting thing turns up anything interesting.

I’m a relative newcomer to Twitter, but I’ve been looking for ways to use it better than just a Facebook status updater. Lo and behold, out comes a post on my Del.icio.us feed (actually I think it could’ve been my Readburner feed) on 17 Ways To Use Twitter.

Another article that got pushed to my feed is Newbie’s Guide To Twitter from Webware, which has guides to Facebook, Flickr and Google Reader too. Definitely a must-visit for newcomers to Web2.0 like myself

In other news, I’m really upset about the bandwidth limitation for Flickr. (100mb a month, and that’s not space, that’s bandwidth). I’m not annoyed enough to stop using it because I really like the sharing options, but I’m doing some research on other sites like Photobucket, Webshots, Picasa and maybe even Shutterfly. Let me know if you have opinions on these or any other photo-hosting sites.