[ September 4, 2008 Update: This feature is now live. View Tutorial (4mins) ]

On Wednesday, I gave an overview of the new File Item Type feature, one of three major enhancements coming to Sixent in just a matter of days. Today's post covers the second enhancement - Feed Pod and Feed Reader.

Feed Pod and Feed Reader

Bringing "Iive" streams of data from external sources can really enrich a number of areas in Sixent. Our new "Feed Pod" will make it possible for you to add "feeds" to any of Sixent's flexible, pod-based pages (your dashboard, profiles, personal pages and groups).

For those of you unfamiliar with what a feed or feed reader is, Wikepedia gives a succinct and clear definition:

"A feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated Web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing."

Below is an example of a Feed Pod that is syndicating news stories from CNN.com:

Creating your own Feed Pod

The process is simple. First, find yourself a feed URL from whatever website, blog or other Web page you want to syndicate into your Sixent account, such as "CNN Top News" or "Phil's Twitter Feed".

It can be an RSS or Atom formatted feed. These feeds are just machine-readable (XML) versions of Web page content. Forget about the difference between RSS and Atom - you don't need to know.

Finding the URL to a feed is not as hard to find as you might think. Just look for the green or blue feed icon to appear in your browser when you're on a Web page that has one.

For example, the below image shows what you'll see at CNN.com while using Firefox. Clicking the blue icon highlighted in red below and then the "Subcribe" link gives you the URL you need.

Soon we'll make it easier to find these URLs without leaving Sixent. :)

We've also made reading an entire feed a pleasure by moving you quickly out of the small pod menu into a clean, full-page interface. The full page "Feed Reader" lets you see the richly formatted content provided by the feed as well as the original Web page - all without needing to open another browser tab or leave Sixent.

Note that even podcasts can be immediately played back through an integrated audio player. When you're done with the Feed, you need only hit the red "Close" button and you're immediately back to the previous page.

[ Enlarge Screenshot ]

Here are are some sample uses of a Feed Pod on each of the respective areas in Sixent:

• My Dashboard
  • Follow traditional news, podcasts and blogs
    
  • Follow contact updates (e.g. Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed)
  • Access your own saved data (e.g. Del.icio.us & Ma.gnolia bookmarks)
    
  • etc..
    
• My Profiles & My Shared Pages
  
  • Share your blog or podcast with others right on your profile
  • Share your updates from other sites (e.g. Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed)
  • Share your "dugg" items on Digg and your "shared" items from Google Reader
    
  • etc..
    
• Group Pages
  • Follow context-sensitive news feeds (e.g. all top feeds for one topic or industry)
  • Consolidate a team's activities from various sources onto a single page
    
  • Monitor brands, keywords and names (e.g. feeds based on Google News or Twitter searches)
    
  • Share complex feed aggregations (e.g. output of a a Yahoo! Pipe)
  • etc..
    

To add a Feed Pod to a Sixent page, you simply click "Add" from any page, select "Pod". In the pod selection dialog, "Feed Pod" is located under "General Pods". Now choose where the pod should appear. The only configuration required is to add the feed URL to the pod.

Eventually we will be adding RSS feeds to our own Sixent pages so you could follow activity, for example, within a Sixent group or on one of your contacts' pages.

In my third and final post about new Sixent features, I will discuss how we've streamlined the "Add" content and items process in Sixent.