Library clips

Rososo - the most simple RSS Reader on earth..similar to WorkHack being the most simple To-Do list. [via DI]

Feed My Inbox - RSS to email…haven’t tried it, I’ve always used Send Me RSS, see more.

Yuuguu - a free desktop web conferencing tool (collaboration, screensharing, etc..), it says you can do client presentations without them requiring Yuuguu…other free services are DimDim, Yugma, Vyew.

The most exciting part is that it integrates with your Gmail / Gtalk contacts. All you do is download the client, enter your Gmail account details and it will grab your contacts, now you can click a contact and they will get a new chat session that asks if they would like to take part in a screensharing browser session. [via DI]

WiseStamp - an impressive email signature (contact widget), also see retaggr [via NW]

Fidj.it - more micro-blogging [via M]

Google Blog Search (GBS) is now memetracking, similar to services such as Megite and Techmeme.

You can filter by a number of categories such as Science, Technology, Entertainment, Business, Politics, etc..

The look and feel is no way close to Techmeme.

Clustering

GBS clusters stories similar to Google News.

Techmeme does something similar but, it does this 2 ways:

1. Stories that link to the main story are clustered as Discussion items (where you can expand to see, rather than GBS launching a new page which loses the context of where you are)

2. Stories that don’t link to the main story but are equally popular are clustered as Related Items (these Related Items also have their own Discussion Items)

In Context and Snapshots

Another thing I like is that when you search Techmeme, you can view an item “In context” which launches to the unique URL of the story with all its clustered items

- whereas when you search GBS, it’s just a standard results page, there’s no way to view that item in context

One thing though, on Techmeme how do I get a unique URL for an item without having to search for it, and click “In context”, how come these unique links aren’t hyperlinks under an item on the homepage?

What I like about Techmeme is that you can enter a date and time and view a snapshot of what was happening that day/time.

The Juice

Techmeme is just more usable and looks supreme, but the difference here is that Techmeme only tracks a set of blogs, whereas GBS tracks the whole blogosphere.

- I’m not sure on the differences in how these services rank popularity, authoritativeness, and influence.

- as Marshall Kirkpatrick says, another feature for breaking news bloggers is who’s actually faster at collating the news everyone wants to know

More

Now let’s see this as my Google Reader homepage.

As an alternative to Google Reader, how about a customised Google Blog Search page, just like Google News Customised.

What I’ve always liked about Megite is that you can make your own memetracker via your OPML, I guess this would be similar as a Google Reader homepage memetracker…Megite also throws in recommended items into the mix.

So what about a social OPML memetracker, that is, base the blogosphere on my OPML and my Google Reader friends OPML (just pretending that Google Reader is a social network).

What I’ve always wanted is a widget for an item on Techmeme…meme clip blogging.

eg. imagine if this screenshot was a live widget

Related

Moopz - Friendfeed memetracker…FriendFeed are now clustering duplicate items (not quite memetracking, but lessens the noise)

Tweetmeme - Twitter memetracker

UPDATE: I just noticed Twitter are doing Newmastering pages just like Google Reader

It seems some special type of Google Reader users are allowed to list their subscriptions or a selected type of reading list (or blogroll) on their “Shared Items” webpage.

Compare my “Shared Items” webpage to Barack Obama.

Now check out this promo page where you can choose from a list of Google Reader Users “Shared Items” webpages.

This is coming into the newsmastering territory, because we also get merged streams of “Shared Items” pages.

For example on this promo page it offers a link to the “Shared Items” webpages of both Barack Obama and John McCain, but it also shows a merged stream of content from both these pages, and a merged feed.
Also on this promo page are links to the “Shared Items” webpages of several journalists, and it also shows a merged stream of content from all these journalists, and a merged feed.

Both of these merged streams have webpages of their own, here’s Barack Obama and John McCain, and here’s the journalists.

So imagine…

…making your own “Shared Items” group pages, I think this will be available soon.

Get ten of your friends and create a group “Shared Items” webpage…list a link to each person’s “Shared Items” webpage, and display a mixed stream of content from all ten “Shared Items” webpages, and to be able to subscribe to one spliced feed from all these pages.

I wonder if it would delete duplicates, and if the duplicate had a “note” it would also appear on the original item.
It would also be good to click on a person from the list and limit the stream to just their “Shared Items”, rather than only having the option to launch to a new window.

Actually this kind of reminds me of a FriendFeed Room, but these rooms don’t just re-syndicate content, you can also manually post right into the page, and on top of that also have discussions.

I also wonder whether the stream will do the FriendFeed type of thing or TechMeme where you can have a popular filter.

Not long ago I posted about Google Reader Shared Items, and was looking for a way to shop for people’s shared items and manually subscribe to them.
I was hoping when I subscribed to them it would appear in the “Friends’ Shared Items” section, but this isn’t the case, this only happens if they are your Gmail Contacts, you cannot manually subscribe to someone into this folder.

This is still the case, but the latest from the Google Reader blog is that you can now choose who of those Gmail contacts are allowed to see your Shared Items in their “Friends’ Shared Items” section. Even if I do prevent a few people from seeing my Shared Items, they could somehow still find my “Shared Items” webpage and subscribe from there…as I mentioned it would just be a regular feed subscription, they would not be able to organise that feed into their “Friends’ Shared Items” section.

How it happens is you can leave your setting on “Share with all my Chat contacts”, or you can now select “Share with Friends”.
This allows you to select particular people from your chat contacts into a more selective friends list.

If you do select a few people to see your “Shared Items”, they will be sent an email, where they can accept, and offer to share their “Shared Items” with you…at any time either of you can disable each other.

The more exciting news is that you can also add email addresses of people you want to add to your friends list, if they don’t have a Google Account, you will have to wait till they create one, if they do have a Google account, they will immediately be available for selection for your friends list (I guess this means they become a Gmail contact). Actually this isn’t exciting at all, only more convenient, because beforehand all I would have to do from Gmail is give them an invite and they would become one of my contacts, consequently they would then become available as my Google Reader contacts.

Read about it in the help section.

What I don’t get is why does someone have to be a Gmail contact first before I can add them to my friends list, or if I do invite a person and they do register with Gmail, then they automatically become a Gmail contact.

As I said in my previous post I simply want to roam around a Google Reader Social Network and simply add someone as a friend, and they have to friend me back.
Then I have the OK to subscribe to their Shared Items, and it will appear in my “Friends’ Shared Items” section…they can always disable me.
The beauty of this is we could also check out each others subscription pane’s…feed shopping.

Now that we have friended each other we could attack another issue in my previous post, and that is if I want to share an item with a particular friend instead of clicking the email footer button I could click a share with friend button, and select some friends I want to send this item to…and it would land in their Google Reader inbox.

I’m thinking of Google Reader looking like Facebook, but when I think of it like this maybe it does make sense to only have one friends list across all Google products. In a Google Reader social network the private message feature would be Gmail, and the chat section would be Gtalk….can’t remember if you can organise your contacts into friends lists.

When I think of it making a Google Reader friends list from my Gmail contacts, is similar to just making a selective contact list in Gmail and then pushing that to appear in Google Reader, only it’s more convenient to do it from within Google Reader.

I wonder if we could make multiple friends lists.

At the moment, as explained in my previous post, the manual way is to create a tag, and make that tag page public, and tell your friends about it so they can subscribe to that page as a regular Google Reader subscription (or they could subscribe in any RSS Reader, it doesn’t matter). Whenever you add an item to that tag, your friends that are subscribed to it will see the new content.

Shawn over at Anecdote has shared the link to his Google Reader Shared Items.

This is basically his link blog (similar to del.icio.us) and it’s great that he can also share stuff he finds outside Google Reader into his link blog.

I share mine to, if anyone is interested, it’s very similar to my del.icio.us links.

If I subscribe to Shawn’s link blog it just becomes another feed in my Google Reader, I was hoping it recognised this feed and put it in Friends Shared Items section.

Problem 1

The “Friends Shared Items” section is automatically added if people in your Gmail contacts also use Google Reader. Umm, just because I emailed a person or they emailed me it does not mean they are my friend. Luckily we can manual deactivate any supposed friend.

Anyway I think the “Friends Shared Items” section should allow me to manually add their feed so it appears in this section, rather than in my regular subscriptions section.

Problem 2

We need another section call “Directly Shared Items”, these would be items that one Google Reader person sends to another Google Reader person. At the end of each item allows you to email an item, well rather just allowing to ping that item from Google Reader to email, why can’t it be Google Reader to Google Reader.

Of course this would mean Google Reader would have to be a open social network, where you can add friends. Once you have added a friend this means you would be able to push an item to a contact. Why be limited to email if that friend also uses Google Reader.

The manual way around this is to create a Google Reader tag for your friend, eg. “Abby”, and then make the tag public, this way your friend, can subscribe to the feed in any RSS Reader . Whenever you tag an item, “Abby”, it will appear in that feed, and Abby will see the items you offer her.

Problem 3

Shawn and I have shared our link blogs, but how do we find other Google Reader link blogs.

Maybe there could be a Google Reader Link blog exchange, just like Toluu does for feeds.

Readburner may be our answer, but I think you have to add your link blog feed (ie. your Google Reader Shared Items feed), I’m not sure if it looks for all the public Shared Items feeds that are out there.

But this is geared more towards being a hot news site rather than shopping for people’s link blogs.

For every shared item, it lists who shared the item, and if you click the name it takes you to the Readburner version of their link blog, there’s also a link to the original site of their Shared Items.
I found an item on the Readburner homepage that was shared by Louis Gray, clicking his name took me to his shared items view, then I clicked on the link to go to his actual Google Reader Shared Items page, and there I can subscribe to his link blog.

Idea

The other day I came across Twiffid

This gave me an idea, in our Google Profiles we can list our websites in our profile, here’s mine.

What if you could run your Google Reader OPML (or your Twitter friends list) through a Google Profiles register, and if any of the feeds in your OPML (or Twitter friends list) matches any websites listed in people profiles, it would give you a list. And further to this, from this list it would tell you which people have public Shared Items.

In an instant you could have your hands on the link blogs of your favourite bloggers.

Even better would be if Google Reader became a social network itself…see FeedEachOther, Streamy, Shyftr, and more.

Oops, I’ve already made a post similar to this one.

Summary

1. I want to shop for link blogs from bloggers I subscribe to
2. I want to subscribe to these link blogs, and for them to appear in a special section in Google Reader (ie. the already existing Friends Shared Items section).
3. I want to send items directly to other Google Reader users rather than email them