Already realtime streams such as Twitter and Facebook have replaced RSS readers for many people, but the problem with a realtime feed is that it passes by too quickly. And sometimes you see a link to a story you want to read, but don’t have time to get to right that second. Enter Lazyscope, a new desktop client from developer Ethan Gahng that is a Twitter reader and RSS reader combined into one. It looks like a regular Twitter client, with links that open in a second pane to reveal the full article, photo, or videos being linked to. But anytime a blog or news source with an RSS feed is linked to, you can also start to subscribe to that RSS feed and it will mix the posts in with your Twitter feed.
Today, Lazyscope is adding a couple new features. One turns the favorite star on Twitter into a read-it-later bookmark along the lines of what Instapaper does. Anytime you favorite a Tweet, it will be available in Lazyscope under a prominent new star icon, along with the ability to read the post in-line without leaving the app. The nice part about this read-it-later feature is that you can favoriet a Tweet on Twitter itself or any Twitter app, and it saves it in Lazyscope. After all, it is just a column showing your favorites, but combined with the inline reading experience it turns favorites into a way to bookmark links.
The second new feature is that Lazyscope will now let you import your RSS feeds from Google Reader or other RSS readers. Before, you could only subscribe from within Lazyscope. The app also lets you subscribe to YouTube users and Twitpic or yFrog photos. Anytime an article is displayed, it shows other recent posts from the same source underneath. Competing with established stream readers like Tweetdeck is going to be tough, but there are some novel features in Lazyscope worth exploring. You can see a video demo of Lazyscope below (which does not include the latest favorite bookmarking feature), or a longer video interview Robert Scoble did with with Gahng. Lazyscope comes out of Gahng’s other product, Lazyfeed, which he launched last year at one of our Realtime Crunchups.