feed

RSS and Atom feed catcher NewsGator has published a pre-release version of their long-awaited and controversial FeedDemon 3.0. The update to one of the most popular desktop feed readers is abandoning the NewsGator proprietary synchronization site at newsgator.com in favor of syncing with Google Reader, and the transition--along with the forced obsolescence of several features that aren't available from Google.

Overall, FeedDemon 3.0.0.27 offers the smoothest synchronization experience yet, but it's still rife with problems. Because of a Google Reader limitation, feeds will only sync the most recent 10 unread items. If you'… Read more

Facebook, it appears, was not about to let Google get this week's award for shadowy new projects. On Tuesday night, a number of users--including Mashable blogger Ben Parr--received notifications that they were beta testers for something called "Facebook Lite."

The notifications, as well as the site hosted on the subdomain lite.facebook.com, disappeared within minutes. It seems to have been rolled out prematurely by mistake.

"Last night, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake," an e-mailed statement from Facebook representative Brandee Barker read. "We have … Read more

Monday's news that social giant Facebook is acquiring the less than two-year old FriendFeed included an important postscript: "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product." But for FriendFeed users, the future seems unclear. Will development on the service be discontinued as the now Facebook-employed FriendFeed creators have been tapped to work on a bigger, and more popular social-networking site? Probably.

What is likely to happen is that many of FriendFeed's killer features become features on Facebook, with FriendFeed eventually shutting its doors to focus on Facebook development. So what are those FriendFeed features Facebook doesn't have, or that FriendFeed simply does better?

Search: One of the most important features FriendFeed has (that Facebook doesn't) is a really solid search engine. On FriendFeed you can search for content from your friends, or the entire world. The best part is, you can save any search you've made and keep an eye on it for updates. Facebook's search is currently focused more on finding people, along with navigating to various parts of its site like events, pages, and applications. Update: Scratch this one off the list. Hours after this post went live, Facebook began pushing an updated version of its search engine that indexes updates and other content. At least for the past 30 days, which is a good start.

Real real time. FriendFeed's real time is a constant flow of information that comes in as soon as the service can get it to you. On Facebook, you get a little reminder to refresh the stream when there are updates. FriendFeed's way of letting users avoid an overload is to simply put the stream on pause--something Facebook could soon adopt.

Content aggregation. Facebook's "highlights" section of its home page does its best to show you new or otherwise interesting things from your friends if they've liked something. It feels like an afterthought though. FriendFeed's solution is to create a "best of the day" which shows the most popular and fresh content that your friends like. It can also be filtered by day, week and month, which lets you get a quick digest of content without having to keep your eyeballs glued to the news feed.

IM integration. I've knocked this feature in the past for being noisy, but… Read more

Surprise! Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, a Bay Area-based social-network feed aggregation start-up.

"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a release. "We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."

TechCrunch reported the news on Monday, a matter of minutes before Facebook confirmed the acquisition.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: This is not … Read more

Twitter tanked Thursday. The outage, caused by a targeted denial-of-service attack, had ripple effects continuing into the evening. I wasn't able to post a tweet with a link in it.

I was reminded of an era not long ago, when it was more newsworthy that Twitter was up. In an homage to those less-stable days, I thought I'd outline some of the better alternatives we can take advantage of during those moments Twitter isn't cooperating.

FriendFeed is the first place to start when Twitter is down. Although it's designed to track updates to all your social networks, it's a fine communication platform itself. The site will let you chat it up about important topics, follow other friends' many social-networking updates, and more. It's an ideal alternative to Twitter.

But if you're looking for something a little more Twitter-like, there are several options. You can try out Plurk. It's a nice platform, but beware that there are very few users on the site. If people are updating their friends about their lives, they're not doing it on Plurk.

That said, it does provide a really neat timeline display and a unique way to spread your feelings. Instead of giving you full control over your message, it asks you to use one of several keywords, including love, like, wishes, hates, gives, and more. It's not bad.… Read more

As FeedDemon closes in on finalizing the code for version 3, FeedDemon 3 RC 4 abandons its proprietary online synchronization at newsgator.com. The fourth release candidate syncs only with Google Reader, as FeedDemon's creator Nick Bradbury announced it would last week.

Bradbury has stated in blog posts and forum messages that he hopes this will open FeedDemon to a wider audience, but the road to prepare FeedDemon for Google Reader has not been a smooth one. Many fans of the program have expressed frustration with the loss of features such as authenticated feeds and synced clippings.

In FeedDemon … Read more

The publisher of popular RSS readers FeedDemon and NetNewsWire is ditching its proprietary online RSS synchronization in favor of Google Reader. Newsgator's eponymous online service will cease on August 31..

When the beta version of FeedDemon updated earlier this year with the ability to synchronize to either Newsgator or Google Reader, fans of the program rejoiced. Google Reader synchronization, the company says, was one of the most requested features for the Newsgator desktop clients. They have instructions for users who need to move their feeds to Google.

Google Reader may frustrate some, but it has far more users than … Read more

How long does it take you to sync your iPhone? I have the 16GB 3G, about 9GB of music, almost 2GB of apps, and about 60 photos. My "Other" category shows up as more than 2GB (!) in iTunes, but that might be worthy of a separate post. In any case, from start to finish, syncing my iPhone on my Windows PC (it's where my music library is) takes almost an hour. A lot of that time is spent backing up or transferring purchases, but it just doesn't seem right that it should take that long.

A … Read more

AP Mobile News Network is one of your better choices for keeping up with the latest news on your iPhone or iPod Touch. This free, easy-to-use application has a gratifyingly responsive interface that gives you quick access to news headlines, photos, and videos.

Headlines are broken down into Top News, Local (you can specify your ZIP code or use your iPhone's location), Sports, Business, Travel, Politics, and Showbiz, each with further subcategories (for example, baseball, auto racing, hockey, and so on, under Sports) that you choose from a slick, sliding, horizontal navigation bar. It's easy to save stories … Read more