Feed Each Other is a new social RSS reader

Feed Each Other is a new social RSS reader. What does that mean? Well, it's kind of a social network and RSS reader all rolled into one, sort of like a cross between Google Reader and Facebook.
As an RSS reader, the layout should be pretty familiar to anyone who uses Bloglines, NewsGator, Google Reader, or any of the other popular web-based RSS readers. You can organize your feeds into folders and you can choose to view just headlines or full articles. Feed Each Other also has a pretty good site discovery feature. Type "Download Squad" into the search box, and our feed will come up right away.
But the social aspects are what really make Feed Each Other shine. When you view our feed, you'll see a list of popular feeds show up in the bottom left corner. These are feeds that users who like Download Squad have subscribed to. You can also view profiles of individual users who have subscribed to Download Squad on the upper right hand side just above our feed's content. You can click on a user profile and see what they're reading. If you like their taste in news, you can add them as a contact.
You can also share interesting articles from your feeds with other users. While Google Reader publishes your shared clips as a sort of standalone link blog, Feed Each Other lets your contacts see your shared items when they login. You can also leave comments on your shared items or others to see and respond to.
Feed Each Other has just emerged from an invitation-only beta, so while it's pretty robust, there are still a few kinks to work out. But the service definitely shows promise.

Here's what's cool about FeedEachother:

• It recommends feeds "similar" to the ones you're subscribed to. Recommendation engines are a key way to leverage the network effect of distributed nodes of knowledge - ala social apps online. Big value there for discovery of high value information sources.
• Sharing notes and items. It's like a combination of Google Reader's shared items feature with commenting - the only thing better would be to post comments inside from FeedEachother back out to the blog posts being read by feed. That would be great.
• Comments are readable. This is really cool; if a blog post you're reading by feed has comments, with a single click FeedEachother will fetch and display them inline with AJAX.
• Multiple kinds of relationships are possible. This is a socially oriented service - so you're supposed to make friends with other users and share information with them. Unlike many other social services, though, FeedEachother lets you designate a contact as a co-worker, family, friend or member of any other group you create. Shared items can then be sent to one group instead of to everyone.
• OPML sharing. When you find people whose shared items you admire - you can download their OPML file of publicly visible feeds in one click. That's awesome.

 

via Read/WriteWeb