While sorting through Readwriteweb, I stumbled upon some product that sounds really interesting: ReadBurner. ReadBurner simply crawls Google Reader’s shared items to rank the most shared posts. Marshall Kirkpatrick is really excited about the potential of the product and so am I.
iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines, they all contribute to developing feed services in a user-friendly way. We see feeds expanding beyond the geek sphere, and becoming must-have features on social networks. Facebook has grown thanks in part to their social mini-feeds, a feature that Myspace had to integrate to remain competitive.
Twitter is the perfect illustration of how feeds are becoming a central communications tool. RSS is the new coded language for interactions online. If you consider the new dominance of feeds over online social platforms, and you couple this idea with the concept of Digging as the ultimate way to share online content, then you can vision the potential of leaderboarding shared items from readers.
ReadbBurner was built by Austrian Alexander Marktl, and it is a company to keep our eyes on (mostly when they will integrate other readers in their services).