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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Web services, Social Software

You too can be a nosy neighbor with iStalkr

stalk friends with istalkrWho's up for a little stalking? Its ok, no Britney Spears stalking, just some RSS and ATOM feed stalking. iStalkr is out of beta and ready for users to create a world of spying and nosiness.

iStalkr is a web application that creates a "lifestream" that will track RSS and ATOM feeds from a variety of services that you might use throughout the day including Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Reader and Twitter over a time line. From that point, you can choose to paste a time line of data into a website or blog to let people know what you are up to, or monitor other people's timelines to see what they have been up to.

It's a pretty cool application, but really doesn't serve any other purpose.. Sure its great to see how many times someone twitters, when they check out their news feeds, and how many times they Digg something throughout the day, but it's just another fluffy Web 2.0 gadget.

[via Profy]

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Google, Freeware

Google Reader offers Trends analysis page

Google Reader TrendsIf you've made the switch to Google Reader, you might be interested to learn that Google has released a page in your account called Trends that will give you some interesting statistics about the pages you read, including the total number of feeds you are currently subscribed to, the number of posts you've read in the past 30 days, the number of posts you've starred or shared, the time of day and day of week that you read posts, and some interesting analysis of your reading trends and subscription trends.

For me, this page is a godsend. It gives me the ability to see which of my subscriptions are dormant, allowing me to feel free to unsubscribe from them - it even offers a handy unsubscribe button next to each subscription listed. The opposite is also true; I can see which feeds update most often, and decide whether I get enough value from reading those feeds to staying subscribed to them.

More details about Google Reader Trends can be found at the official Google Reader Blog. Unfortunately, I've yet to be able to deduce what the % Read statistic means; my initial thought was that it describes how many of the posts in a given feed I've actually read, but that doesn't make sense when I go back and look at my actual feeds. Maybe someone can comment here with the actual meaning of that column.

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services

Feed Crier: IM Notifications for feed updates

Feed CrierFeed Crier is a new service from Adam Kalsey that will send you an IM notification whenever RSS or Atom feeds you're subscribed to are updated. This sort of thing has been done before, of course, but Feed Crier has some features and a little polish that we haven't seen before. It only works with AIM (only temporarily, Kalsey assures us), but signing up is fast and easy. There's no form to fill out--you just send an IM to feedcrier on AIM with the keyword subscribe and the URL of the feed you want to subscribe to, and you're up and ready to go. The free version of Feed Crier lets you subscribe to up to three feeds, but paying a $4 monthly fee gives you unlimited feeds, feed summaries, a web interface for managing your feeds, and offline delivery for when you're, well, not online.

[Via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Web services, Open Source

Feed2JS: Embed any feed in your web site

Feed2JSFeed2JS is a handy service that will let you embed any RSS or Atom feed in your web site or blog. All you have to do is paste in the URL of a feed and Feed2JS will give you a snippet of JavaScript that will display the feed on your page. Feed2JS is pretty configurable, letting you choose how many items to display, whether it will show full items or just headlines, whether or not to strip HTML from items, what time zone offset to use if displaying dates, and more. And if your CSS skills aren't up to snuff, Feed2JS also has quite a few pre-defined styles for prettying it up.

Filed under: Fun, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, How-Tos

Viewing Google Reader feeds in 3 ways

three ways to read google reader feedsThe Official Google Reader Blog has a quick how-to for setting up three different ways to view your Google Reader feeds. Granted, this is rather simplistic for anyone who uses the specific tools they mention- those tools being OS X's feeds screensaver, Firefox's Live Bookmarks, and grabbing podcasts in iTunes. Still, most of the world has yet to truly understand the whole "feed reading" thing, so if your granny is still scratching her head in front of that shiny new iMac, this might be a good little intro for her...

Filed under: Web services

FeedRinse: Filter the cruft out of your RSS feeds

Feed RinseLike Download Squad but sick of hearing about Vista? Or maybe those Time Wasters are really wasting too much of your time? Try Feed Rinse. It's a service that looks at your RSS feeds (OPML import included) and filters out posts based on keywords, author, tags, URLs, or even profanity. Feed Rinse scrubs the feeds and then republishes them so you can still read them in your feed reader of choice.

Unfortunately, Feed Rinse's free service is.. limited. You can only filter three feeds in the Free version and there's no profanity filter. The next step up is "Plus," which isn't even available yet but will cost $5 a month for 20 feeds, and Premium, which supports up to 300 feeds, will cost $8/mo. That pricing structure seems a little wacky to me, but it looks like a useful service so hopefully they'll find their niche.

[Via Lifehacker]

Filed under: Web services, Google

Sharing feed items with Google Reader

Google Reader ClipsDevelopment on the somewhat unpopular Google Reader doesn't seem to go at a furious pace, but every couple months they drop a new feature into it and usually it's at least marginally cool. Yesterday was such an event, and the feature they've added lets you share selected items from the feeds you read with your friends. Now each label in Google Reader has a "make public" option, and when you enable it two links are generated: One that your friends can click on to subscribe to those items in Reader, and one for an Atom feed that they can use in any feed reader. It also works for starred items. You can also do the same for your starred items. On top of that, there's also a new "clip" feature similiar to yesterday's Feedo Style that lets you add a live list of your shared items to any web page by pasting a snippet of code on your site. You can customize the box's title, color scheme (you have eight predefined choices), and number of items shown.

Filed under: Web services, Google

Google Reader gets an update

Google ReaderJust when I was beginning to think of Google Reader as cobweb-ware, the Reader team has announced a nice update to the web-based newsreader. It's nothing earth-shattering, but they have made labels much easier to use with a new drop-down menu as well as a keyboard shortcut that makes adding labels lightnight-fast for us keyboard junkies. There are also some miscellaneous features and additions like better error messages and improved sorting and filtering. It's still not as robust as some web-based services but every improvement helps.

Filed under: Web services, Commercial

FeedLounge web-based feed reader goes live

FeedLoungeI've had an invitation to FeedLounge in my Inbox since July, and now I'm never going to get to use it. FeedLounge is yet another web-based feed reader service, but has gotten pretty stellar reviews, and has just opened up to the public. It has the requisite AJAXy interface ("you may quickly forget that you’re using a web application"), a full set of keyboard shortcuts, three different views (Outlook-style, three-column, or river of news), color-coded tagging and flagging, OPML import and export, 401 authentication, and more. One thing you'll find in FeedLounge that you won't in most other services, though, is a price tag: FeedLounge costs $5/month or $50/year. You can try a three-hour demo, but they only let 50 people on at a time, and the waiting list is pretty long.

Filed under: Blogging, Web services, Open Source

Blox0r: AJAXy Outlooky RSS reader

Blox0rTV Squad guy Keith McDuffee got it right when he said "silly name, neat interface" telling us about Blox0r, which advertises itself as "The best online aggregator ever!" Its an AJAXy feed reader that uses a classic Outlook three-pane interface. On the left is a list of feeds you're subscribed to, a la Bloglines, and on the right are two panes, one for headlines and one to show the stories you click on. I like the default mode because it takes you to the actual web site so you can read comments and so on, but it also has a Preview Summary mode which will show summaries of all of the recent stories in a particular feed. It has most of the features you expect from a web-based feed reader and a few more, so despite the name it's worth a look if you're in the market for a feed reader. What's more, it's open source, so you can download it, tweak the code, and run your own aggregator service if you want.

Filed under: Windows, Blogging, E-mail, Microsoft

Outlook 12 to include RSS reader

FeedsIn the not especially surprising news department, Redmondmag.com is reporting that Microsoft is planning to include an RSS aggregator in Outlook 12, to be released with Vista in the second half of this year. This is bad news for the likes of NewsGator who sell plugins that give Outlook feed capability. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft will reconcile the inclusion of feed support in both Outlook and Internet Explorer.

Filed under: Web services

The Atomibulator: Atom feeds for feedless sites

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~cpk25/atomibulator/index.htmlRSS and Atom feeds have become ubiquitous to the point that we've begun to take them for granted, but there are still some sites stuck in the stone age. For those sites there's Atomibulator, a service that watches feed-less web sites and provides an Atom feed that's updated whenever they are. It's a bit crufty at this point--adding a feed to the service requires editing a Wikipedia page--but potentially very useful still.

Filed under: Developer, Blogging, Google

Hack Google Reader: Unofficial API docs released

Google ReaderHere's a bit of trivia: Google built an RSS API first and then built Google Reader on top of it to show what could be done with the API. Though Google claim to be working on releasing their own API docs soon, developer Niall Kennedy got a head-start on them and released his own Google Reader API docs. Kennedy describes how to use the simple REST API to retrieve any feed in Atom format, get a user's subscription list (you need the correct password, of course), and read and tag items. Google Reader's project manager Jason Shellen wrote in to Niall to confirm the accuracy of docs and provide the above bit of trivia and suggest that Google's official docs might be available inside of a month. Either way, I hope we see some cool Google Reader hacks as a result.

Filed under: Internet, Mozilla

Standardized feed icons

Feed IconMicrosoft's adoption of Firefox's feed icon for IE7 has sparked a lot of activity, and in the interest of standardizing on one feed icon for all web sites and browsers developer Matt Brett has created Feed Icons, a web site where you can download the new "standard" feed icon in every format imaginable. He's also encouraging people to customize feed icons in a variety of colors and will be hosting customized icons starting next month.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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