RSS is a wonderful invention. But what it often means is that you try to read ten times the content that you used to. Because, of course, it’s so easy to slip through feeds in your RSS reader, and so whenever you find a new website with an interesting article you hit the orange button. (By the way, if you haven’t already, do hit the orange button).

And Google Reader is a great product. It really is. But then you wake up one morning, hit the link and there are 11,000 unread items. Plus Google has been a bit naughty recently with its interface design. What once looked cool and clean is now a bit of a mess.

I present, m’lord, item one:

What is all that stuff? I quite liked it when sharing came along, but now – ugh too much.

Solution 1: It’s Not a List; It’s a Magazine

So I was delighted to discover Feedly last year (via. Drew Benvie). It distils your web feeds, does some magic sorting and displays the stuff you should read on a single page.

I like this a lot. It doesn’t tell you that you’ve got 11,000 unread items; it doesn’t have a ton of possibly important but inscrutable menu links. Like Reader, the content is lazy-loaded in the background, so you can click on links and read the item’s content without reloading the site.

It also doesn’t show you everything. You won’t ‘get-through’ all your feeds this way. But that’s kind of the point. Once you’ve stopped enjoying reading updates, you can move away without feeling guilty.

In case you do feel guilty about this approach to reading RSS feeds, I’d suggest that it’s close to the original ‘river of news‘ idea that Dave Winer suggested, except there’s been some clever manipulation of the items so you’re less likely to miss popular news.

Solution 2: Health and Efficiency and Helvetica

So what if you are a bit more conscientious or hard-working? Find that whole magazine idea a bit strange. Or have a keen sense of design offended by so-called web friendly fonts? The solution for you, my benighted friend, is Helvetireader.

Helvetireader is a CSS rework of Google reader that hides extraneous elements and makes the rest look plainer and more beautiful. It’s a two-step installation process. You need to install Greasemonkey for Firefox or Chrome. It’s a scripting add-on that you’ll find lots of other uses for if you look into it.

Then go over to the Helvetireader website, where you can install it from the button. Version 2 has just been released, which is prettier than Version 1, which was awesome. The next time you visit Google Reader, it will be beautified. And minified – the plugin hides a lot of stuff, so you won’t like it if you are addicted to features.

Helvetireader can be used in exactly the same way as normal Google Reader, but works as its best if you know the short-cut keys. There are loads of these. The important ones are:

• j/k – next / previous item
• space – scroll down / next folder
• s – star this item
• shift+s – share this item

It seems as though ‘n’ and ‘p’ do something similar to ‘j’ and ‘k’, but I couldn’t work out the difference.

It’s been a little while since I wrote on this topic, but social (and not-so-social) bookmarking is on the rise again.

Remember Diigo, Blinklist and Magnolia from all of two years ago? No? And at least 122 others who wanted to become the social bookmarking standard. They all lost to delicious and improved services from mainstream providers.

All of the competitors were essentially the same as delicious but with some extra usability features or nicer interfaces.

You can’t really catch up or overtake competitors on the web like that, it seems.

Delicious had the early-mover’s advantage of lots of content and a large user base. Even though some of the others were better, functionally and aesthetically, they couldn’t make up the lost ground.

But here we go again. Because people now have increased expectations of their computers and the Internet; because they are now expecting full-fat Internet content on their phones; because the use-case is slightly altered, we have a new crop of bookmarking apps.

These applications are for people are looking for something different – multi-platform compatibility, privacy, downloaded content – as well as great usability. The emphasis on sharing is exchanged for an emphasis on utility.

Here are brief reviews of five relatively new contenders. All of them have Firefox Extensions available, which was my criteria for inclusion.

Instapaper

Instapaper was one of the first of the new generation of bookmarking applications, and deserves full kudos for that. It was also one of the first to create phone applications to complement its service. Sadly, though, it’s somewhat eclipsed by its competitors below when it comes to functionality and usability. Still maintains the first-mover advantage, though.

+ one of the first of the new breed of bookmarking applications

+ really simple and easy

+ iphone app

- relatively narrow functionality

- no browser integration

ReadItLater

Simple to use, synchronises, downloads for offline use. ReadItLater is best-of-breed if what you want is a means of reading that interesting-but-lengthy article later. It’s simple and elegant. It might be too simple for some, but in that case, you’ve probably got a more sophisticated solution for bookmarking that you can run along-side. I have to say that the user experience from start to finish is excellent.

+ Scads of apps for almost any platform you can mention.

+ Downloads the full text of articles for offline use.

+ Synchronisation between different clients.

- No sharing, tags or so-forth – personal use only.

Zotero

The only open-source solution on this list, I believe, Zotero is simply awesome for academic researchers. It grabs and stores pages for offline use, creates citations for all of the major academic style guides and indexes them. You can also add tags and notes and relationships. This is probably the most powerful nu-style bookmarker on my list, though not the most elegant. It also lacks the mobile and social features of the opposition here.

+ specifically designed for academics

+ synchronisation with web server

+ downloads and parses PDF files as well as web pages.

- no mobile functionality

- specifically designed for academics

- no public sharing (hey – it’s for academics… )

EverNote

An application with fervent followers, EverNote was arguably the first of these applications, debuting as a desktop application, if my memory serves me right.

There’s still a great desktop application, and now there are web and mobile versions as well. However, I fail to understand the fervour that some people demonstrate for EverNote. I think that there are much better options on this page.

+ applications for almost every desktop/mobile/thingy you can mention

+ great usability on the desktop.

- not free for some of the most useful features

- also antisocial

- I find the web application cumbersome.

Feedly

I include Feedly here because it’s got most of what it takes and may well integrate perfectly well with your existing web workstream. Very basically, it’s a skin for Google Reader that makes your RSS feeds look less like a chore and more like an interesting magazine about stuff you’re interested in. Its integration of Google Readers Shared Items and Notes means that it could well serve your needs.

+ full integration with Google Reader, without the pain of facing 4000+ unread items

- no mobile app

- Firefox only

What Should You Install?

I’m currently trying to use Feedly and Zotero, but they (very slightly) conflict with each other at the moment*, which is enormously annoying. I’m also using ReadItLater, which remains nice to use and well-designed, with great mobile functionality.

If you’re a Power-User, I’d go with this setup, and hope the developer of one or the other sort out the conflict soon.

If you just want powerful bookmarking and offline reading – Zotero.

If you just want a reminder to read stuff on your own computer – ReadItLater

If you want social, Feedly or stick to delicious.

*The address bar add-ins for the two won’t both appear. Normally, Feedly wins.

It’s a sort of wiki – but wait, come back! There’s a few interesting differences from the sort of wiki software you might be used to:

(a) the whole thing is contained in a single HTML file – the javascript, the CSS, the data you’ve added.

(b) so you can download it and use it on your laptop or travel with it on a USB key. If you like you can sync that with an online version.

(c) you can use it on any browser – even the iPhone.

(d) it’s written to encourage short posts – Tiddlers – rather than the massive empty spaces found in the MediaWiki software and others.

Apparently, there’s some way to use it as a blog platform, but I’m still working that bit out…

The company also plans to change the name of its plug-in from ‘audioscrobbler’ to ‘scrobbler’. “It will scrobble your music,” says Stiksel, almost maintaining a straight face.

So is this Web 2.0? After all, you don’t even need to visit the site to benefit from its recommendation service, let alone social network with anyone. “Well, yes, I think so,” says Stiksel. “it’s a web application so it’s in line with that part of that trend. Also, it’s combining the knowledge of all of our users in a ‘wisdom of crowds’ way. No music journalist could have the knowledge required to keep making new recommendations to all of our users. All people together know more than one person could ever know.” Last.fm also encourages users to form groups and blog about their favourite music, offering free space to every user. This approach differentiates last.fm from Pandora, a rival internet radio company. Pandora employs a team of editors to categorise and subcategorise music in order to provide music recommendations with qualities in common to a group or song you suggest to it. The jury is out on which provides the better recommendations, but last.fm wins on its Web 2.0 credentials.

Can you make any money from last.fm? I always ask this question, even when I know the answer. “We have advertising on the site. We’re working regularly with 10,000 record labels to supply the music so we have pretty close relationships with many of them. We sometimes have difficulties with some labels, though. Some record companies are very suspicious of any internet music venture. They think we’re all pirates,” he grins. Or I think he is grinning: this is a phone conversation. There’s also money from subsciptions. Users can upgrade their account for a £1 a week to get rid of the adverts and get priority when the server is being heavily used.

“We want to be able to sell music downloads, as well. It seems like a good idea – we introduce people to new music, and then hopefully, we can introduce a mechanism so the users can purchase the track they’re listening to. If we can make it quick, simple and inexpensive, I think that will work. We have some obstacles, though. We really don’t like DRM protected music, but the labels have a hard time accepting that. They think it will lead to piracy.”

I tell Stiksel that I am a regular user of the service. “You want to be careful who you tell that to”, he laughs. “People like to go and look at other people’s pages to see what they’ve been listening to. We call it audiostalking. Like when you go to someone’s house and the first thing you do is look at their bookcase and record collection. You think it gives you an idea of what sort of person they are. We have a lot of funny stories of people trying to defend what’s on their page – ‘Oh it was my little brother’, they’ll say, or ‘oh, that came on by accident’”.

Of course, it won’t happen anytime soon. As Paul Boutin points out in Slate (link below), people want ownership of their own stuff. Having the spreadsheet that tracks your finances in your office on your own PC or your own network space irrationally feels a lot safer than putting it on a website. What’s more, giving the people who run the web services the opportunity to poke through your documents feels very uncomfortable. About five years ago, the ‘next big thing’ was thin client computing, whereby we’d all use cheap consoles to log onto server farms where our applications and documents would live. It never really took off because people wanted proper computers and ownership of their own things.

Also, for all the hype, the mobile internet doesn’t really work yet. Yes, around central London you can easily pop into an internet cafe and obtain access. But try maintaining internet access while you’re in the back of a moving car, on a long train journey or a flight, the times when access to your applications, messages and documents would be really useful. For as long as there isn’t 99% reliability, the sort of reliability that you can expect from your home or office computer, then there is going to be considerable resistance to web applications.

Paul Boutin discusses the Google PC in Slate magazine

It makes sense for Google to develop a Web-based PC. To be clear, a Google PC needn’t involve a new gadget like the “thin client” gear of the 1990s. Every computer in the world is capable of running a Web browser. We might not realize it, but we all already have Google PCs.

You could still run Windows on a Google PC; it just wouldn’t matter if you did or not. Most Google PC rumors imagine a low-priced, Windows-less, entry-level computer for the Wal-Mart set. That could be part of the plan, but it would just be one more option. Instead of trying to convince every consumer on the planet to buy a new machine, it makes a lot more sense for Google to build a super-service that you could log into from any computer, phone, or television, or car and airplane seatback. You would be able to access your files anywhere by logging in, calling up your desktop, and popping into Google’s array of Gmail-like applications for word processing, photo editing, and anything else you can think of.