Daily Clerks

There are several options to choose from with RSS feed readers. You can choose a standalone client (FeedDemon), a browser plugin (Sage), or a reader accessible through a website (Google Reader). All of these options, however, lack some of the features that newcomer Fav.or.it promises to provide. The service is not yet available, but will enter private beta testing soon.

Fav.or.it , which just launched its preview website today, is aiming to provide a feed reader that also helps you find and organize your favorite feeds and content. Users will have "a central repository of thousands (in future tens of thouands) of blogs which can be searched, viewed and replied too all within one website."

The service announced that the reason for the preview launch is to get people to start submitting their blogs into the system. "We want 10,000 blog feeds and we are allowing you the chance to submit your blog right now so that it is one of the first to be aggregated when the site goes public."

The purpose of fav.or.it is to eliminate most of the hassle involved with finding blogs and keeping up with all of your favorites. You can stay in one site, but visit and interact with several different sites. The fav.or.it team believes that "the problem right now is that the most common form of reading i.e. a feed reader is a separate experience from reading and replying to comments."

To find blogs you can choose to filter results by tag, ranking, or category. Each of the blogs you choose as your "fav.or.it" will be added to your feed stream. To keep things from being cluttered in your stream, all blog posts that have been read are surrounded with a gray border.

Marking a "fav.or.it" also helps a blog's ranking on the site, which will then be displayed to the rest of the community. The starting rank for a blog is determined by its Technorati rank.

What sounds most interesting about the service is the comments features. Users will have the ability to write a comment and have it appear to both the fav.or.it community and to the original blog. This should give comments a more universal appeal that will hopefully keep spreading into more applications.

Of course, right now it is too early to tell if this service will succeed, but I am keeping my eye on it. Look out for a beta launch soon and, if you want to, submit your blog for a change at being one of the first 10,000 in the network.

It's worth a shot!

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