Lazyfeed, a Web service with good buzz, has opened up and is available to all today. It’s a browser-based tool for reading items from RSS feeds with an interesting premise: What if items were organized not by the originating feed (here’s Technologizer’s) but by topic–and were updated in real time? Like many brand-new services, it seems to be suffering some launch-day hiccups at the moment–it’s a bit sluggish, and is giving me some errors. But it’s still worth checking out.
Once you’ve signed up for Lazyfeed, you can tell it what you’re interested in by connecting it to blogs you like, and your accounts for Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and/or Flickr; you can also simply enter tags for subjects that matter to you, such as firefox, microsoftoffice, iphone, or palmpre. Lazyfeed then builds a list of tags for your topics and lets you peruse blog posts and articles that relate to them, and updates it continuously. (You can also save items for later reference.)
The emphasis in Lazyfeed is very much on the newest stuff rather than the ones that are most relevant or from the biggest sources–for instance, the last time I checked the feed for “microsoftoffice,” the first item I saw was a job listing from a company seeking a secretary with Microsoft Office experience. I’d like Lazyfeed even better if the most worthwhile items on a topic were easier to find; maybe it’ll get better at filtering them for me as I use it more. I’m already finding it useful, though, especially for discovering items from sources that aren’t on my menu of feeds over at Google Reader–and which sometimes come from sites I’ve never heard of. Lazyfeed isn’t meant to replace Google Reader or other standard RSS readers, although I could easily see it adding enough browse-by-source functionality to make it a substitute for a typical RSS reader rather than a complement.
If you give the service a whirl, let us know what you think.