Eventually I found one I loved, and though I never did quite get around to recommending you all the excellant Newshutch.¹ RSS reader many others did (37 Signals and Pstam). Unfortunately they have decided to close the site and after ‘learning a lot’, Nathan and the team(?) have decided its time to move on. I thank them for their effort, but I am really sad to see them go; 18 months of RSS satisfaction.

So I am back to where I started, well almost. One of these feeds that I subscribed to is the journal of John Hicks, a designer based in the Cotsworlds, and for many months now he has been spamming us with his incessant ramblings (concise text actually but it makes for a better story) about his gReader theme. Never paying much attention till the day that my preferred option abandoned me I decided to give it a try.

Hicks’s beautification of Google Reader, in a similar vein to the unfinished Shuttle / Wordpress exercise or Steve Smiths Tiger Admin Panel, has been achieved by releasing some modified css that gives a this RSS reader a new lease of life. Full instructions are here and you can download the theme from his site. This improvement to Google Reader softens my loss. Kudos to you Mr Hicks and your incessant ramblings!

1. there are still some good reviews and up if you are interested and haven’t any idea what I am talking about, I can’t actually access the site at the moment. [back]

It seems after the compatibility issues people have had, the UAC control in vista appeared to be the cause the most frustration. For me its not been an issue, I am happy to have the extra security there and to have peace of mind. The one remaining piece in the jigsaw for me has been Last.fm’s Audioscrobbler, their client for use in their social music network. (This is not the place for an intro but if you have music running through your veins or an ipod plugged into your ear as you read this, you should sign up or at least take a look.) Unfortunately, the Last.fm client on Vista required admin rights when doing most most things which was quite frustrating.

Fix

Well I am pleased to say that after doing a lot of searching, the latest version (from 1.3.2) does actually fix this. If you haven’t updated, hit help and check for updates to download the latest version or download the package from here.

It is worth noting though that if you are still getting the UAC control popping up you may have set the app to run with admin rights which it no longer requires. Right click on the shortcut, click ‘properties’, the ‘compatibility’ tab and untick the “Run as Administrator” check box.

As a quick introduction for those that aren’t aware of it, Feedburner is the stats management package for your RSS feeds, monitoring a great depth of information from subscriber numbers to click through’s to your pages. It re-writes your RSS feed and allows you to add features and customisations adding greater value to both your readers and you as the site marketer or owner.

This clearly is a good deal for all concerned, Feedburner is a relatively established web startup (almost a contradiction) that has raised a little over $10 million dollars in funding and is currently monitoring 422,717 publishers with 721,074 feeds. This works out at roughly $236 a head which in comparison to many social networking sites is pretty high. For Google they are getting the no.1 feed stats management package out there with an established user base and technology.

So what does Google’s acquisition for a reported $100 million mean and how could it effect you as the customer / reader?

• This clearly confirms the value of RSS feeds that many in the web and advertising industry already know. Many net savy readers already read sites through news readers, rarely venturing to the actual site itself and while monetising feeds (as its come to be known) isn’t new this is confirmation that Google clearly sees this as another advertising medium they would like to swallow.
• Google are very unlikely to pull this one out of the open web space like they did with Adaptive Path’s MeasureMap but surely this acquisition will lead the way to integration into Google Analytics. The integration with Adsense and Analytics would seem to make it a likely brethren, ultimately though making web stats a requirement of the feed stats could be a bold move to far though.
• This will be bad news for users who would ‘prefer’ not to use Adsense to monetise their sites as the current ad networks will be inevitably squeezed out in favour of Google based advertising in the future.

Congratulations Feedburner, clear and present evidence of another company making one hell of a profit from flipping their company to one of the biggest out there.

Pulse is a hosted web app that gives you the basic of statistics for your website available as a RSS feed or through their site. Simply sign up and add the JavaScript to the footer of your site’s (x)html to start tracking visits, incoming links and search keywords. Then log in and subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite reader and check out the stats while reading the headlines and drinking your morning coffee.

With the data available in xml format too, I am just waiting for someone to develop a Wordpress plugin. Stats available in your dashboard would be very handy.

Best of all though….. its FREE and with more features to come it can only become more useful.

I have been looking at Virb in some more depth through the beta phase recently. I am a sucka for well designed sites, and Virb fits nicely into this criteria. Certainly Virb offers an awful lot for the designer in us all and has been developed from the ground up with this in mind. Complete customization of the front and backend like this, has not been seen before in popular social network and should encourage many people originally put off by the blinding customizations popular in MySpace. Structured ‘Modules’ incorporating content from third partied like YouTube and Odeo can be created and placed in your profile and as a user you have control over the html and CSS – heaven! No more div overlays!

Conversely, most social networks downfall, the ‘MySpace design effect’, is alleviated in Virb with the simplest solutions; a ‘remove customization’ button prominently placed in the header. Clicking this button restores the original, clean, simple and most importantly neutral default theme that ‘ships’ with each new profile and is remembered when you return to the profile.

Labeled by Christina Marie, “MySpace for Grownups”, Virb certainly fits the bill. With de-facto social networking features and advanced abilities to come like importing blog posts via RSS, Virb has done an awful lot right.

So where does it fit in? My thinking is that currently the MySpace monolith might be too big at the moment but in the future there are going to be a lot of existing users from Facebook and Bebo that may move as the site snowballs. One thing I am sure about is that there is space for a mature social network in this crowded marketplace. Vox, the closed social network or social blogging platform, had better watch out.

PhishTank is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet. Also, PhishTank provides an open API for developers and researchers to integrate anti-phishing data into their applications at no charge.

What will be very interesting to see will be how the community grows and how their API is utilized. A wordpress plugin anyone?

So come on everyone, “Shop a Phisher!“

Including the obligatory web 2.0 revenue model centred around different subscription plans will keep the investors happy; these range from ‘free’ (5000 visits a month and two pages tracked) up to pro for 250,000 visits and unlimited number of pages tracked. Based on the price plans available, it will be interesting to see how popular this service will becomes and / or how soon one of the big search engines eats them up. My personal gut feeling is that Google will probably be prime suitors and snap them up to integrate them into their existing stats services like Google Analytics and Measure Map.

Combined with a first class statistics package like Mint, I firmly believe this sort of usability testing will become as valuable to site owners / designers as SEO in the future if it isn’t already now. Take a look at Crazy Egg and see for yourself, it can show up some surprising results!

Update: It appears it was a mistake and traffic was routed to a maintenance page by mistake.

(5:00AM PST): Digg temporarily down while we switch over to Digg v3.0.
(6:10AM PST): Digg v3 is live.
(6:20AM PST): Demand is so high we’re adding more machines.
(7:50AM PST): We are making a run to bestbuy to pick up some more servers (kidding). Seriously though: We are seeing much higher activity than we normally do, so bear with us as we turn on additional machines and tweak the site throughout the day.

While not quite as much a revolution in the design as v2, v3 certainly benefits from the expansion of various different topics such as ‘Science’, ‘Entertainment’ and ‘World & Business’. Adding the ability to sort the stories based on popularity such as top stories this year also expands the feature set.

With sites like Newsvine and Netscape building on Digg’s features and I feel like Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and the team behind Digg are realising the potential threat of competition that increases each day.

Though topic expansion has no doubt been on the cards for a while, Digg has begun grow its service no doubt feeling sure that they have the basic site refined enough to cope with the growth into other subject areas. Naturally as the success of Digg increases so the attraction and financial benefit of rigging the system will increase proportionally. On the back of VC funding back in October, no doubt much of the work has gone on the backend, putting the infrastructure in place to cope with the growing click fraud Digg appears to have been suffering from. With all that at stake lets hope that in the time they have taken to expand into these areas they have done everything they can to minimise the possible effect this may have on genuine news articles. Good luck guys.