Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.
The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product. → Read More
Diffbot is a geeky and incredibly interesting technology that uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to process the content on the Web the way a human being can. “The entire Internet can be broken down into 30 different page types” explains Co-founder Mike Tung, also known as “Diffbot Mike,” and “Diffbot can identify them all.” Diffbot knows the difference between a social network profile, a blog post, a site’s front page, a product page, an event page and dozens more.
Today, Diffbot is releasing its first set of APIs, now open to all developers for free. The launch has the potential to dramatically impact the types of applications developers can build, and for consumers, it means a whole host of intelligent applications are about to emerge. → Read More
Cross-platform newsreader application News360 launched into version 2.0 today, a significant update that introduces its new personalization features. The news reader now learns from your activity on social Web services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and Evernote, in order to present you with stories that fit your interests.
But unlike some of its competitors, which there are now many of, News360 uses semantic analysis to deliver the most relevant news of the day, including stories about your favorite topics from your favorite sources. → Read More
Here’s why I’m glad I was wrong about RSS being dead. The latest evidence of that comes from Jesse Stay who reported a week or so ago that both Facebook and Twitter had discontinued RSS streams or something like that. I really didn’t bother to read up on the details since it’s now years since I gave up on the stuff. These days I obsess about Lady GaGa and whether Brian Wilson’s version of Good Vibrations is better than the one with Mike Love and when Ustream is finally going to stream live to the iPad and why some apps only stream audio over AirPlay and turn the AirPlay icon blue instead of white.
And then Jesse Stay apparently convinced his friends at Facebook to reconsider and reinstate RSS. In so doing, Facebook instantly removed any further conversation about RSS. This includes no further references to the famous Monty Python dead parrot sketch, the Franco is still dead SNL running gag, various tech dead memes (Office, Notes, Windows, links, FriendFeed, Sun, FlipCam, PointCast, the ASP model, laptops, podcasting, TV, email), and all synonyms, most importantly Toast → Read More
Every few eons we get another RSS is dead swarm of stories, usually involving Dave Winer versus the rest of the universe. Sub-themes include dead calling is stupid, I found this post on RSS, and get off your porch grandpa. Typically Dave uses the event to launch yet another version of Radio 8 tricked out to convince us that his lack of business model business model beats traditional data silo roach motel closed software. It may sound like I am pursuing a personal vendetta.
I’ll admit to some mixed emotions about Winer and his attempts to regain control of what he calls RSS but is in fact a new socially adept layer dominated by Twitter. Starting with my post several years ago on TechCrunch, I’ve stated the obvious, that RSS has become at best a formative technology that has led to the development of realtime social streams of citations. → Read More
For a long time after the launch of the iPhone, despite thousands of apps for just about everything you can imagine, there was no killer RSS reader app. That changed when the 2.0 version of Reeder arrived earlier this year. It’s so good that I often prefer using it to reading feeds in Google Reader, long my go-to RSS reader. And the iPad version is even better. And now it’s about ready to launch in beta for the Mac.
While the blog Macstories did a preview back in September when the software was in early alpha, it has come a long way since then. And developer Silvio Rizzi has given me permission to do a short preview of what you can expect when the beta hits (sometime in the next couple of weeks, he hopes). I’ve been using the app for months now, and it’s finally feeling rock-solid. And it has completely replaced Google Reader for me. → Read More
The news on Monday appears to be that Facebook will reinvent email. TechCrunch says it’s the long awaited Gmail killer. Others say it’s Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit’s project since he came to Facebook in the FriendFeed acquisition. Paul says he hasn’t been working on that, but rather the Big Freaking Zip File app where we can download all our Facebook bits. And anyway, he’s gone — off to Y Combinator to continue his angel investing. And I’m gone — from email. Have been for a while now.
I still use email all the time. Or rather, it uses me. I watch colleagues at work (Salesforce.com) bounce back and forth from Outlook and Gmail, selecting, reading, skimming, and oh yes, deleting, deleting, deleting. You have to do that in Outlook, to stay ahead of the Mailbox is Full message. Gmail, not really, but it’s hard to break the old habit. And recently I had to start paying for that privilege, when Google stopped raising the limit and converted me to a cloud customer. → Read More
Google Reader has been my go-to RSS reader since October 7, 2005. How do I know? A new update to the service today tells me that and a few other interesting tidbits about my reading habits.
Technically, the big news of this update to Reader is a new fullscreen mode. I guess it’s nice to have in certain circumstances (just hit “f” to activate it). But to me that’s a little ho-hum. Much more interesting to me are a few of these new statistics they’re dishing out. → Read More
Remember that famous expression championed by Sun Microsystems, “the network is the computer”? As the Internet gets more and more pervasive, that expression is becoming more true than ever. Case in point, Lexmark all-in-one printers now allow you to read any RSS feed on their touchscreen interface. That’s right, you can keep up with global politics or the latest World Cup action right from your … printer. → Read More
In case you missed it, Apple announced the long-awaited iPad yesterday. And while there’s been no shortage of coverage by just about every technology-related blog on the planet, perhaps you’d like to be able to use Google Reader without every third post being about the device. If so, there’s a very simple search trick you can use to filter out all the iPad-related hoopla. → Read More
Distinguishing feeds on Google Reader can be a little hard. Since every feed has the same default blue RSS icon, it requires reading on your part to tell them apart. Reading is hard. Pictures are easier. Today, Google Reader takes a step in that direction by finally adding favicon support to feeds.
The new feature certainly livens up Google Reader quite a bit. The only problem now is that you have a lot of feeds, like I do, it’s not exactly easy on the eyes with zillions of colors bombarding your peripheral vision. But hey, no doubt some people will like this, and most importantly, it’s opt-in. → Read More
It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift. I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore. Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it. RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving. In this world, partial feeds were irritating, taking me out of my new pristine think tank and back to the hunt and peck methodology. Once back on the site, the goal was to keep me there, or link to partner sites. This disconnect drove me away from partial feeds and toward the new owners of the blogosphere — the deep information space of those feeds that respected the reader container. From NetNewsWire on the Mac to Bloglines to Google Reader, I swam in the brisk waters of the RSS river, only returning to the classic Web from links embedded in posts or email newsletters. The fulltexters won, and in the process, sowed the seeds of RSS’s decline. As fulltexting carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news, navigating outside the comfortable walls of RSS required some additional value proposition. Comments were that attractor, and particularly the active threads where the readers could interact with the authors. The result: The Statusphere. And in reaction, the need for social management of the ecosystem. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed – whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime → Read More
As just about any other gaijin living in Japan, I came to love Japanese toilets. They have multiple buttons and functions to play around with, keep your bottom warm during cold days and are generally totally over-engineered. While this is pretty cool and fine with me, Japan’s Inax has now overdone it with a very interesting online feature. → Read More
Silicon Valley start-up Trackle.com is launching the public beta of its personalized Google Alerts to track pretty much everything in an internet user’s life. Trackle’s technology and interface is innovative and disarmingly comprehensive. It provides real-time personalized feeds of the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, how much a user’s house value is down this week, updated job listings, sports scores and much more.
The breadth and specificity of Trackle’s information is what differentiates itself from other RSS tracking applications like Google Alerts, Yotify and Notify.me. Trackle doesn’t just search for keywords, it incorporates change into the keywords and provides up-to-date, highly customized information about fluctuating internet content. For example, if a user is eyeing a camera on sale at Amazon.com but only wants to spend $200, Trackle will monitor the sale and provide you updates of when the camera price reaches $200. Trackle keeps all of this information on the user’s personalized site but the user can also choose to receive the real-time alerts via SMS and e-mail. Imagine if a user is bidding on an Ebay item; Trackle claims to give real-time price updates on an auctioned item. For free. → Read More
In what’s sure to be recognized as one of the greatest inventions of 2008 (by me, at least), here’s a shelf that can be bent every which way, thanks to the miracle of “elastomer” AND displays your favorite RSS feeds and any incoming text messages. → Read More
This is a quick test to see if Bloglines and other RSS readers breaks on links. Dear RSS reader readers: There should be a link [between these brackets] if there isn’t then there’s something wrong. Is there? → Read More
The very-excellent FeedDemon RSS desktop software from NewsGator has gone from $30 to free. I find Google Reader to be a great RSS reader but when I need to really dig in and catch news items as soon as they’re published, nothing beats a good standalone client like FeedDemon. NewsGator has also decided to give away its Mac client NewsNetWire, its mobile client NewsGator Go!, and its Outlook plugin NewsGator Inbox and will focus its money-making strategies on its enterprise software. NewsGator via TechCrunch → Read More
Well, well, well. I finally know what I can do with Google Gears and it makes me feel funny deep down inside my pants. Get your head out of the gutter! My ankle itches, you perverts. Anyways…back to Google Gears and the amazing things it can do when you’re stranded without an Interwebs connection. It’s THE perfect solution for people who have to travel and rely on their laptop and the Internet to survive in this crazy world. OK, not really, but it’s a start. For example, you can refresh your Google Reader feeds before leaving for work or whatever it is that requires you to leave your abode and voila, all your gossip and news is right there in front of you. It’s simple to use, you see. Just install Google Gears and click the “offline” link and you’re set to go. Feeds on a plane! [Google] → Read More
