ReadBurner – Aggregating Google Reader’s Shared Items

ReadBurner is a new site created by Alexander Marktl in his spare time.

ReadBurner is

an experiment how fast a site can spread through the Google Reader shared items, which is what ReadBurner aims to aggregate.  

The site’s main goal is to find the most popular posts from within Google Reader’s Shared Items list. For a long time, people complained about the lack of this feature. If you want to add your linkblog to the list of stories shared on Google Reader, you may do so on this page. A full list of blogs being displayed is available here.

Stories can be tracked by Currently Popular, Most Recent, Popular This Week, and Most Popular All Time. Some people have commented that this site is useless – however, it is a huge time saver if you follow popular web development and new sites. In many cases, reading through your feed aggregator, particularly Google Reader, in this case, you’ll have to view multiple views of the same subject, whereas this service helps eliminate this problem.

While the site is still in Alpha, there are still lots of things that will be added and improved upon in the future. The site doesn’t offer RSS feeds, so you won’t be able to track the newest shared items. Another important fact is that the site, like many other ‘Digg-like’ sites, helps the larger blogs appear on the first page more quickly, shown once again with this site. Another key problem is the extremely long list of stories shown on the front page, pagination should be implemented or some other way of fixing the problem. There should also be another area for random or upcoming sites, as Digg has. Feedback (ReadBurner Blog) is important to help the site improve.

Nevertheless, the site already appears to offer a great service and should become very popular as improvements are implemented.

[via Mashable]