Note to anyone developing an RSS reader: If you don't support OPML, we're not interested. While adding feeds for your favorite web sites one at a time might have sound like fun, once you've got more than 10 feeds, the charm of entering them by hand kind of wears off. And over the last few years, we've accumulated just a few more feeds than that. So when we first heard about new kid on the RSS reader block Shyftr a few months ago, we pretty much ignored the site. But now that Shyftr has added OPML support, we decided to upload our 465 feeds and take it for a spin.

What sets Shyftr apart from RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines is the service's social aspects. Users can leave comments on items they read, and those comments can be seen by any other Shyftr users who subscribe to the same feed. Shyftr got a bit of bad press last month when the company tried to add comments from the original article page to Shyftr, and eventually decided to remove this feature. The issue might not have been as controversial if comments left on Shyftr were automatically added to the original page, thus alleviating allegations that Shyftr was trying to move the discussion away from the blog itself and into the Shyftr community. But there are some technical challenges associated with doing that, not the least of which is that there are a number of different protocols that blogs use for posting comments.

Like any good social network, Shyftr lets you become "friends" with other users, view their profiles and activity, and invite friends who haven't already signed up for the free service.

One thing to note is that while Shyftr now has an OPML import feature, it's slow. It only takes a few moments to import a few hundred feeds. But it takes much, much longer to "process" those feeds. And if they don't process correctly they won't show up in your feed reader. So if you've got more than a few hundred feeds, you might want to hit the import button right before heading out for your lunch break. Maybe it'll be done by the time you get back. But if you leave the page during the process, you'll have to start all over again.

[via Louis Gray]