I get very excited when I see new companies in the tech industry growing up (especially when I use them and they’re in the Philadelphia area). ReadBurner is no exception. In the past few days, they’ve rolled out some great new features — categorized popular this week, paging on certain pages, integrated comments and the latest is a partnership with NetVibes. This last one is exciting. From the ReadBurner blog, Adam writes:
This announcement gives you a bit of a taste of what we’re up to – analyzing what people are sharing across the Web on all sorts of different services. As such, our tagline has now changed to “what’s shared on the Web.”
While some may not understand why this is a big accomplishment, I feel that it is. They have a goal to let every user (that one’s for Drew) know what’s hot on the internet without regard to who says it’s hot. This differs from Digg.com and the other content rating sites like Technorati by a large margin. Digg uses a system where people can vote something up but they don’t even have to have viewed the site to do it and Technorati uses an authority system. This means that certain users and blogs have a higher likelihood of hitting the front page simply because of who or what they are. ReadBurner takes the guesswork out of this. No weights, no preference, simply sharing.
In addition of providing the top articles in different categories, they also allow you to quickly hop to both Google Reader and NetVibes to share more items right at the top of the screen.
While they have a long way to go before they are fully accepted, I think they’re heading in the right direction. They have made an active choice to keep from moderating the information or removing articles that they don’t like (see, lolcatz can make it up there each and every day). Keep an eye on these guys because they have some great stuff on the way.
As a side tip, I like to see what I’ve shared with ReadBurner. While Google Reader does not provide an API, you can however bookmark a page on ReadBurner to see all of the things you’ve shared as well how many others have “voted it up”. Visit http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/broadcast and click on Your Stuff on the left and then on Shared Items. You should get a page that looks like this:
Copy the link that says at this web page. The number at the end can be appended to the following URL in order to view your shared stuff on ReadBurner’s site.
http://www.readburner.com/index.php?u=
My shared items would be:
http://www.readburner.com/index.php?u=14196529623142207361
That’s it for now. Hopefully Google will get on that API but for now, enjoy yourself and keep on sharing.
