Soon after the release of Google Reader’s public share feature there was a huge outcry by the user base against the lack of privacy tools and permission granularity.

Google was quick to explain on how to use properly the new set of features, allowing for the users of Reader to share only the stuff they want with whom they see fit.

Of course some minds got working on how to use this public filtered stream of data. And sure enough some services launched that tap in to Google Reader’s public feeds.

ReadBurner is a nice example that I actually find attractive not only from the design stand point but also by the way news are sorted.

Alexander Marktl the creator of ReadBurner, made two excellent choices in the conception of this app. The first and most important option at least for me is that all the feeds that ReadBurner indexes were made available by the users.

The second choice Alexander took that makes me real comfortable by using this service is that it sorts news items by their popularity, much in the way Digg works but without any voting.

News items are simply ordered by the number of times users have shared such items, which means that the important stuff will quickly rise to the top of the heap.

Unlike Digg there is no concept of front page, all news are sorted in the same page. This raises some scalability problems for the future, but they’ll probably only paginate the list.

Items are also divided by their language, which is a nice idea, despite the language choice being a bit limited and some major languages are missing, like German or Portuguese.

And obviously a service that indexes feeds being filtered by users using a online feed reader has their own feed, which can be easily customized on site.

All in all this is a great idea. Right now there aren’t that many users which means that there aren’t that many feeds being uhm… fed into the system. But ReadBurner has a lot of potential and will surely be a major player by the end of 2008.