It's part of our culture to want to get more done in less time, so it's unsurprising RSS readers are so popular nowadays. But what happens when efficiency and productivity start to replace general happiness? Well, that's what happened to a long time web publisher/surfer known as Halsted (AKA Cygnoir), who recently became fed up with her RSS addiction.

"I dread opening my RSS reader these days," she posted the day before giving up on RSS. "Right now there are 876 unread items glaring at me, from a total of 269 feeds." As of this writing, the brave soul has managed to get through about a week without relying on a reader -- you laugh, but some of us are truly addicted!

RSS and other technologies are often praised for their ability to save time, effort, etc, but it seems many forget their limits when they get into the habit of turning free time into work time -- all the time. This gets us wondering: How many feeds is one too many, and -- for all the RSS addicts out there -- how often do you check your feeds?

At first, it sounds like a texting nightmare from hell, but RSS via SMS has a place in our world through Web-Alerts, a small web experiment that may get lost in the vast internet desert that is web 2.0 failures. The service sends you a text message for every update to a chosen site's RSS feed.

The service is simple and easy to use. When you first visit the site, it'll ask your to enter a web address. If it finds an RSS feed for your chosen site, it'll ask you to enter your cell phone number. Should any updates happen to your chosen feed, a preview of the update will be forwarded to your phone. Removing a subscription is easy enough. "Just open the link in your text message and choose 'My Alerts' to remove any alert you are subscribed to." Furthermore, you can enter a keyword with your phone number so that you'll only be forwarded updates via SMS when they contain the keyword.

This could be extremely useful for someone closely watching a specific topic such as a stock broker. It could also become extremely annoying if you find yourself answering your phone every ten minutes to stop the latest SMS from incessantly vibrating in your pocket. Our advice: use wisely.

[via The Boy Genius]

Google has added a new way to share your favorite feeds and articles with friends, through Google Talk, aka the Gmail address book.

Google Reader has included a "Share" button for a while now, but if you wanted people to actually read your shared listings, you had to direct them to a URL or RSS feed. Now your Google Talk contacts can also see the items you're sharing on their Google Reader page.

Next time you login to Google Reader, you should notice a few of your Google Talk contacts' names hanging out in the navigation panel on the left side of the screen. Google Reader will tell you how many items they're sharing, and let you scroll through their shared item feed as if you have subscribed to it. You can also manage your friends list so that only certain people can see your shared items.

This is a great way to check in with friends to get feed recommendations for websites you might have never visited before, or interesting articles that you have passed by. Or is it Google's stealth social network in the works?

If you are faced with the decision of what tidbits of your life to post on Pownce and what to post on Twitter, worry no more, and post to both at the same time.

There is a little hack that Jetpacked brought into the light that makes it possible with TwitterFeed. Normally, Twitterfeed would be used to feed your blog into Twitter, but by creating a link to your Pownce accounts RSS instead of your blog, posting in one place makes it possible to post in two at the same time. You can start things off by using your OpenID to log into Twitterfeed.com, then entering your Twitter credentials, and using your Pownce feed (http://www.pownce.com/feeds/public/USERNAME) as the RSS Feed URL, and set the frequency rate.

No more deciding what network to use, your Pownces will now be automatically Twittered.

So now that Yahoo owns Flickr why not integrate all these crazy, top notch, up to the second, newsworthy photos into Yahoo's image search? It only makes sense.

We wrote about this happening, and it's taken quite a while to do, but Yahoo has finally included Flickr photos in its queried search results. When images are uploaded to Flickr accounts worldwide and tagged, Yahoo gains access to these additions via a live feed from the Flickr service. When users then search in Yahoo, Flickr images will be marked with a Flickr account name. Searchers can then choose to view and search all photos by that particular user.

So as long as images are tagged correctly, they should start showing up in searches on Yahoo's Image Search.

Feed reading might be a little time intensive for some busy bodies. Open an application or web location, read, and repeat. How about making it a little easier? Anothr is trying its best to speed feed reading up. We covered them back in October with the release of their RSS aggregator for Skype, and now they enter the market with a reader for users of Google Talk and Jabber clients.

To get Anothr up and running, add the contact name "anothr@gmail.com" to your friends list in Google Talk. The Anothr RSS alert bot will send you back an IM with links to manage and share subscriptions. You can enter website links, or upload OPML files to import sites and get the news ball rolling. However, this solution might only be good for a few important news feeds. I couldn't imagine getting bombarded with a feed update every 2 seconds.

If you are looking for a simple way to read your news feeds, this could be for you. It could be an annoying way to receive updates to your favorite news, but if you want to be notified immediately of updates, this is a great way.

We're becoming big fans of Tumblr here at DLS headquarters, and the 'blogging scrapbook' service just introduced a new feed importing feature that makes it an even more appealing tool. A new option in the settings area allows users to add multiple feeds from their other blogs, with the ability to aggregate your other content as regular posts, photos (say, from a Flickr feed) or mere referential links. Combine this feature with Tumblr's option to publish under a custom domain name, and you have one powerful über-blogging service that could even trump Yahoo!'s Pipes in terms of making it easy to aggregate yourself on the web. This way, you get a live HTTP page, as well as an RSS feed, of everything you're publishing.

Everyone has been trying out Netvibes new mobile service that was just dropped, so I thought I would give it a go and see what all the hype was about; I was surprised at the results.

Netvibes, as you probably know, is an Ajax start page that allows you to plug in feeds and modules to import all of you important information, and have it all right in front of you without switching between different browser screens. The new mobile service allows users to grab their most important information and read it on their mobile device.

Continuing the buzz surrounding the new Google Reader, 3rd party Greasemonkey scripts are cropping up that either modify or add much-requested features (like integrating it with Gmail). At the top of this request list (or at least near it) is search - after all, it is a Google product. Unfortunately, the Reader team's own Mihai Parparita has explained in the product's Google Group that search is a bit tricky right now - but they're working on it.

While you wait though, why not add at least some basic search functionality with this Greasemonkey script? Be warned though, as by 'basic' I mean 'it can only search a single feed you're reading, or all blogs across the blogosphere, via Google's Blog Search.' For now, it can't search multiple blogs (a limit of the Blog Search engine itself) or folders of feeds in Reader, but hey - it's a start. On the plus side, the author is open to suggestions if anyone knows of an engine better suited to the task of searching multiple sites at once, so throw your two cents in if you want to make the only Google Reader search that much better.

For someone who doesn't have a Facebook account, I've sure been Facebook-obsessed this week. I've been on the edge of my seat watiting to find out what changes, if any, Facebook's developers would make after many users freaked out about their new News Feed and Mini-Feed features. All told, the largest anti-News-Feed group gained more than 700,000 members in about three days, almost 10 percent of Facebook's entire membership, and numbers like that can't be ignored. Today Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a blog post announcing changes that give users more control over what information their friends will see in the News Feed and Mini-Feed. The blog post is almost comically humble, beginning with, "We really messed this one up." He goes on to say, "Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about." He also thanks all of the vocal users and points out, somewhat indirectly, that it was the News Feed itself that enabled millions of users to find those anti-News-Feed groups in the first place.

I'm glad that this is the route Facebook took. The Feed is ultimately a very useful tool and really sets the site apart from MySpace by putting the emphasis on the user and not pageviews. This granular control of what information is shown in the Feed probably should have been included from the beginning, but Facebook's experience will serve as a learning tool for it and many web sites to come. Hopefully.

Feed2JS 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.

Continuing on our obsession with RSS today, comment 87 from James on my RSS Readers: Sound Off! post got me thinking. If anyone out there does not use RSS, why not? What don't you like about RSS, or what makes you not want to use RSS? Living in a very saturated tech world myself and being an IT administrator, I use RSS as a part of daily life, and don't really understand why you wouldn't use it (especially in my job), but what do you think? If you don't use it, why not? I have always wondered, and know that I am not going to get all over your case about it either, I am just curious. Since I am not a cat, I figure it is safe to wonder. I've heard that the majority of our readers do not use RSS, and I realize that I am a geek, not a normal person (kinda wish I was normal sometimes), so here's your chance to enlighten the binary brain of a techie. Consider this a "10 things I hate about you" aimed at RSS.

SocialMail is a handy service from Big in Japan that will turn any e-mail inbox or mailing list into an RSS feed. It's pretty simple: you sign up and get a unique @biggu.com e-mail address. Then you can put that e-mail address on a mailing list or forward messages from your inbox to it and they'll automatically be posted to an RSS feed. The latter functionality can be handy if your company has a generic support@ or sales@ e-mail address, for example, that you want lots of people to be able to monitor easily. As far as I can tell, SocialMail is free for anyone to use.

I'm glad Google didn't wait too long on this one. A week after the release of Google Calendar, they've released the API that will allow third-party developers to build tool for interacting with it. The Google Calendar Data API includes functions for fetching a calendar's feed, adding events, and requesting events based on date range. So far it's pretty basic, and I think we can expect it to be expanded in the near future, but for developers itching to dig in, it's a start.

Development 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.