With speculation that Facebook might be launching an RSS reader at its press event next week, it’s important to think about why users loved the Google Reader experience. Hint: it wasn’t because Google Reader was social.
Here’s an RSS reader app for Google Glass. Users can save articles to Pocket or email them to themselves to read later.
Digg isn’t a newcomer to the social news scene — in fact, it helped pioneer the concept. But the folks at Betaworks are re-imaginging social news for 2013, and the RSS reader they plan to launch in late June will play an integral role.
Netvibes, the San Francisco-based startup that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS feed dashboards, has added social analytics capabilities to its web content monitoring platform. But can the company hold its own in today’s world of hyper-funded and hungry social media analytics startups?
Even with Twitter, Facebook and so many other social discovery tools popping up, I’m still a big fan of good old-fashioned RSS for my reading needs. That’s why I’m excited about the release of Reeder for Mac, which is now available on the Mac App Store.
Web workers are a busy group, and it can be too easy to get buried in our work while rarely surfacing to keep up with the latest news, trends and other information that we should be learning.
Last Friday, I was attending Portland’s weekly Beer and Blog event, and I stumbled across what later turned out to be an interesting trend. I had two separate, unrelated conversations about an hour apart with people working in the technology industry who once used RSS readers but had mostly abandoned them in favor of using Twitter to find news and interesting blog posts. I talked to a couple of other friends and posted the question on Twitter, which confirmed that many people are using Twitter as an RSS reader replacement. Read More about Is Twitter Replacing the RSS Reader?
I’ve been using Netvibes to make monitoring dashboards for clients because I like the visual dashboard layout and have found that it is fairly easy to use, even for people who are new to RSS readers. Because the layout is a little more visual than some of the other RSS readers, it works really well for monitoring conversations because you can see quite a bit of information across multiple feeds at a glance. One limitation with Netvibes has been the inability to create multiple pages, each with a separate set of tabs. Previously, you could only have one set of tabs. If you needed a new set of different tabs, you had to create a new Netvibes account under a different email address. Needless to say, I have more Netvibes accounts than I can keep track of as a result of this limitation.
Today, Netvibes will add support for multiple personalized pages. I’ve had the opportunity to check it out in advance. Now with one account I can create several pages, each page with a unique set of tabs. As a consultant who works with many clients, I love being able to separate the monitoring that I do for each client without having to keep track of multiple Netvibes logins. You can customize the look and feel of each page to add a logo or custom color scheme to easily tell at a glance which page you are viewing.
Read More about Netvibes Adds Multiple Personalized Page Support
In my recent post about using Harvest to track my time, I discovered that I was spending too much of my time consuming information. As a result, I’ve been working on ways to further increase my efficiency, starting with some Twitter efficiency improvements, and I thought that a post about becoming more efficient at consuming blogs and other news content via RSS would be a good next step.
I love information and wish I could spend more time reading and consuming it, to learn more about a variety of topics. However, the harsh reality is that there are only so many hours in the day that I can spend reading and learning. I could take the easy way out and just read less, but my goal is to become more efficient at finding the content that I want to read the most. Read More about More Efficient RSS Reading
It’s been pretty quiet here on jkOnTheRun the past few days due to a whirlwind schedule of traveling and meetings for both Kevin and I. We left Vegas after 6 days of CES coverage on Monday of this week and on Wednesday we both headed out to San Francisco for a meeting with the GigaOM team.
I love San Francisco and always enjoy visiting but this trip is a very fast-paced short one with a full schedule. We had an all day meeting at the GigaOM headquarters yesterday that saw us leave the hotel at 7:30 am and not returning until 10:30 last night.
Both Kevin and I brought our MacBooks which we used to give two presentations to the group. The MacBook worked well for giving the presentations since we had access to that special VGA adapter to hook it up to the projector. Shame on you Apple for not providing that adapter for free.
We created the presentations in Google Docs in keeping with our cloud working philosophy and that worked well to preclude the need to give handouts to attendees. We just gave them the links to the two presentations in Google Docs and were done with that.
Kevin also brought his MSI Wind and it was nice to see how well Windows 7 runs on the Wind. I had forgotten how small and compact the Wind is and am impressed anew as I am every time I see it. On a similar note Windows 7 is running well under Parallels on my MacBook too.
Today will find me working in SF as I head back to Houston tomorrow. It will be so nice to get some down time at home. I will post an abbreviated Mobile Tech Manor column later today. You probably noticed there was not one published last week since I was at the CES all week and not even at MTM but I’ll try to get one done for the past week soon.
