What’s a feed reader? Well, it’s a piece of software that lets me read RSS feeds. So what’s a good RSS feedreader? One that at least lets me read the feeds I want to read. What’s a bad feed reader? Well, a feed reader that won’t let me read my feeds. One that actually goes as far as to establish that my feeds are just not good enough to be put into the feed reader.

But surely, no feed reader would do this, right? Well, there’s one. Fav.or.it. Launched today into private beta, it shows this message to users (click to view in full):

Well, here you go. If those stupid users weren’t so inconsiderate as to try to import their feeds, the feed reader would actually work. I don’t really care how many great new features, including commenting of posts directly from the reader, a reader has. As long as I’m told what to actually read, it sucks. Ass. Especially when it’s used as an excuse for not scaling.

The almighty FSM has finally answered my prayers and sent an invite for Netvibes‘ new iteration, “Ginger”, my way. You could of course argue that it was a member of Netvibes who sent this invitation my way, and that it was less my praying to the FSM and more my incessant begging all over the goddamn web. But that’s a technicality I’m not going to indulge in any further here. Lets move on to what Netvibes has created with Ginger:

First and foremost, you can now add a public page for yourself, humbly called “universe”.It’s a nice way of showcasing all your feeds and what else you’ve got going with that myriad of other services you’re probably using. Plenty of widgets like the Twitter or Skype ones will facilitate that. Well, here’s mine. When you’re having a look at it, don’t forget to note my last.fm widget, for it displays the groovy taste in music I undoubtedly have.

Another new feature, but not yet active, is a 2GB online space, letting you store mp3s, documents and whatnot. Like I said, not yet active, but showcased on the Netvibes blog here.

And since it’s web2.0 and nobody wants to do stuff alone anymore, Netvibes also enriched their service by adding contacts. Find out who’s on Netvibes and add them as contacts by importing from your address book or other services like Twitter and Flickr (I can’t wait for Open Social to make all that redundant). Save items from feeds and show them to your friends. Like so:

Whatever your friends or contacts are sharing you can view by clicking the “Activities” tab on the top bar of Ginger:

As I’m hugely unpopular and haven’t yet had time to trick and bully people into becoming my Netvibes “friends”, there’s nothing in that list yet. But I’m sure it will look quite awesome once there’s stuff in there.

That’s it for now.There’s a slew of other little changes, which you’ll be able to notice yourself either mid-February when Ginger will launch for everyone or sometime before that if you were able to shamelessly beg yourself into Ginger the way I did.

I recently got an invite for Streamy by leaving a comment at Mashable.com. (Thanks Mashable, even though I don’t agree with your practice of automatically adding every commenter to your site-wide social network!).

Basically, Streamy is a feedreader combined with a very sophisticated social network. Not so basically, Streamy is a very, very slick way to consume your daily news. Full to the brim with Ajax, Streamy incorporates in its webbased service what normal desktop apps are usually known for: drag and drop and a whole lot of eye-candy. The fact that the site isn’t slowed down to a crawl by their heavy use of Ajax shows how well it’s been implemented.

I could now of course show you a few screenshots, as other sites have done already, but that wouldn’t really do the service justice. You’ll have to trie it yourself to see how slick the interface really is (I’ve got one invite left, leave the wittiest of comments, and you’ll get it!).

Rumour has it on the Internets that due to it’s social news aspect, Streamy is set out to kill popular Digg. Now, first off, I’ve never been a real Digg fan. I admire Kevin Rose for putting together something this big from something so little (which would be a network infrastructure and some viral marketing), but the appeal of submitting stories has never been that big for me (and of course the fact, that 90% of its members are technocentric early-adopters, giving the “democratic” news a certain, well, edge I sometimes find a bit tiring).

Streamy, on the other hand, is not very similar to Digg. It’s more of a feedreader with very social tendencies, letting you share your stories with your friends or groups you are a member of. There is no real voting for stories, and even though you can add comments to stories, I don’t think any service can replicate the effect of the savage commentary of Digg-diehards.

Unfortunately, I can’t see myself leaving a feedreader like Google’s Reader for Streamy. Why? Well, Google lets me share and save stories too. And while the interface may not be as slick, simply because it’s a more devoted reader than a network, browsing stories is a lot quicker and more intuitive.

I can see Streamy succeeding as the service that it is, but only if they manage to get ahold of the people who have not yet found their feedreader of choice. Because even with the added social aspects and the really beautifully implemented interface, Streamy just can’t compete against the big players in the field.