Nick Bradbury announced today that shared news aggregator site ReadBurner has added Newsgator (ie FeedDemon) shared items feeds to their site.  This means that us FeedDemon users can join all the cool Google Reader kids over there.

Along with including NewsGator feeds, they’ve added NewsGator as a tab up the top of their site along with Google Reader & Netvibes so you can read your feeds without leaving the ReadBurner site.  While that’s not a huge feature to me (FeedDemon FTW!) I’m sure it would be handy if you used the Newsgator web interface.

Here’s the instructions from Nick on how you add you Newsgator clipping feed:

Here’s how it’s done:

1. If you haven’t done so already, share one of your clippings folders as an RSS feed (this screencast explains how this is done in FeedDemon).
2. Copy the URL of the shared clippings feed to the clipboard (in FeedDemon, you can do this by clicking the “Copy” link from the clippings properties).
3. Browse to http://www.readburner.com/
4. Go to the "Add Feed" option on the right hand side of the ReadBurner menu bar, then select “NewsGator Clippings” and enter the URL of your clipping feed.

Also, as Nick mentioned, FeedDemon allows you to share web pages as well as feed items.  Just drag the url into your clippings folder & it will get added (Just the title, the content of the page won’t be added).

This is great, and a great boost for Newsgator & FeedDemon as they get more visibility in the RSS reader market place.  Remember kids, FeedDemon, along with the syncing ability of Newsgator is free! You need to download it now.

Update: Here’s my clippings folder on ReadBurner.  It’s just showing up as ‘Link Blog’ despite me putting in my alias.  Oh well, I’d prefer to have my name there, but at least it’s working! Drew from ReadBurner responded to my issue & has already fixed it, thanks Drew! (see comments below)

.  Of course it’s on US Pacific time, so it doesn’t start until 5PM Australian EST.  So don’t forget to get Firefox & be part of the world record.

I just received an SMS from the Jaiku bot saying that their SMS service was back up & operational.  I’ve sent a post via the SMS bot and it is working, so it would seem that maybe Google hasn’t completely abandoned the service after all.  This would be good. I liked Jaiku when it was first launched, it had a few features that I feel Twitter lacks (channels for one, plus native image posting) without over-complicating the service.

I’ve always thought that with GMail, GTalk, Grand Central & Jaiku, Google had the building blocks for a really comprehensive communications platform.  Add into that mix Google Apps & Google Docs and you’ve got a solid business system to work from.

Imagine if Google rolled GTalk, Jaiku and Grand Central into a single app/service.  It would suddenly become a serious competitor to Skype if they could get the sound quality and pricing right.  Skype was supposed to be the communications platform of the future (if you believed the hype), but due to a number of factors, including the acquisition by eBay and the fact they use a proprietary VOIP protocol, it hasn’t happened.  GTalk runs on an open VOIP protocol, so you can talk to non-GTalk VOIP clients. If done right that could be one killer app.

You may think you’re a big user of FriendFeed, you may think you have heaps of followers and everything you submit gets liked & commented on.  Sorry, that’s nothing.  Google has spoken and the most important FriendFeed members are…

Deepak & Kevin, congratulations.  Google says you’re more relevant than the About page, the FAQ or the public feed.  That’s pretty impressive!

Additionally, if you go the ‘More results’ page you’ll note that the order goes like this:

1. Homepage
2. About
3. Public Feed
4. Scoble
5. API
6. Bookmarklet
7. Blog
8. Louis Gray
9. Changelog
10. Steve Rubel

Hands up anyone who’s surprised to see Robert at number 4?  Anyone, anyone?

For anyone who’s game, and especially for anyone who’s been having problems with the FriendFeed Comments plugin, I’ve just checked in a new beta release that you can download.  It’s not available through the WordPress auto-updater yet because it’s not been tested sufficiently.  So if you’d like to help out you can grab it here: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/friendfeed-comments.1.6.0beta.zip

There aren’t any major visible changes.  There’s a couple of tidy up changes eg. I removed some inline styles that I should have moved into the default stylesheet, but the major changes are behind the scenes.  Some people were having issues with the plugin not retrieving the information correctly and it seemed to be an issue for people with a large number of posts & comments.  So this new version now stores the data in a custom table on your WordPress database.  This should make things much more efficient and hopefully less error-prone.

If you do install the new update you must deactivate & re-activate the plugin, then go to the settings page & click ‘Save Changes’ before it will work.  If you don’t the table won’t be created and it won’t work.

If you can help out with the beta testing it would be much appreciated.

From the Mozilla Developer Centre:

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavour to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready”. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 – the best web browser, period.

Plus the 3rd Release Candidate is out today.  Unless you’re on a Mac you don’t need it though, as it contains only a single change to fix a Mac-only bug that was causing the system to hang or crash at startup or shutdown.