A week ago I’ve reported the end of ReadBurner. But as Alexander Marktl the founder of ReadBurner stated in the final post at ReadBurner’s blog, ReadBurner was for sale.

I honestly expected that some domain trader would buy it and load it with ads and popup’s but to my surprise Marktl sold to a group headed by Mashable’s Editor in Chief Adam Ostrow.

Marktl has made the official announcement just a few minutes ago and clarifies his choice in selling to this particular group:

After some email discussions and phone calls, I decided to go with Drew, Adam and Eric because they understand and like the concept of sharing items through Google Reader as much as I do. Moreover they obviously have the skills and the resources to build compelling web products.

Marktl also comments on the number of emails he received asking him to continue with this project, and that’s is why he’ll stay on board with ReadBurner holding an advisor status.

Adam Ostrow defines the next moves for ReadBurner on his post at Mashable announcing the acquisition.

The first step is to get ReadBurner back online, and we hope to do that within the next couple weeks. Alex – who is staying involved with the project in his free time - has some concerns about the scalability, so we’ll be addressing that before we re-launch. After that, the plan is to keep reaching out to all of the evangelists (see here, here, and here for a sampling) that ReadBurner was lucky enough to find in its first go-round and continue to improve the site based on their comments.

I’m happy with this move mainly because i liked ReadBurner clean and efficient style, RSSMeme wasn’t quite the same, maybe it’s just a design thing but what I’d really would like to see is the same kind of aggregation found in ReadBurner in FriendFeed.

We all make choices in life, and like the rest of the world I too make them everyday. I’ve chosen ReadBurner to browse shared news and the hottest buzz around the Internet.

ReadBurner was a simple aggregator service that gauged the popularity of shared items at Google Reader and displayed the top items in a simple and easy to use interface.

It was so good that soon after it’s launch several competitors appeared with the same model. ReadBurner was created and operated by Alexander Marktl who was trying to cope alone with the pressure of being the hottest thing around the net.

But sadly the pressure was too intense and the competition was gaining strength specially RSSMeme, which is also a one man show developed by Benjamin Golub.

This one on one battle for the top shared news aggregator reached it’s end today, when Marktl wrote the following announcement on ReadBurner home page:

I’m sorry to announce that ReadBurner is no longer available.
The reason is that I just don’t have time to keep the site up and running, because of some freelance projects that I cannot drop out.

I really want to thank all of you guys for supporting me, giving me feedback and visiting ReadBurner. It’s been very exiting to run a website that got so much Buzz from the blogosphere in such a short period of time.

If you are still interested in the idea of ReadBurner I suggest you to try out RSSmeme which is a very well done clone of ReadBurner developed by Benjamin Golub.

This annoys me, not only because i liked ReadBurner, but because i now have to change my bookmarks. What I’d like to know is when will Google itself release some kind of aggregator like these services?

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.

RSS feeds are the butter of the web 2.0 bread. The rss feed market is by nature a subset of the web but it’s getting bigger each day by the development of new ways to distribute content and media directly to the consumers.

I think it’s safe to say that half of the blogs and podcasts in existence today are consumed entirely via a RSS agreggator. And it’s now common for institutional websites to have some kind of blog too.

The initial wave of RSS clients was based on desktop apps. It took a couple of years for the next logical step, which was web based RSS aggregators.
For the latter part of the last decade our lifestyles have been changing to adapt to the mobile world. And web based rss aggregators fit perfectly in this new reality.
Bloglines was a major player in this revolutionary market until Google deployed it’s all mighty Google Reader and set web based rss reading as the new standard.

Apparently everybody forgot all about desktop based rss readers. At least until now when out of the blue Newsgator reminds us that desktop RSS readers are still alive, by releasing most of their product line for free.

This seems a desperate attempt at desperate times. And i really doubt that this move will dictate the return of desktop readers.

By the way do you still use a desktop based RSS reader? Why?