14 DAY TRIAL // With aggregators and link sharing sites or other popular services like Twitter or FriendFeed to help users keep up with events and discover new content, RSS/Atom feeds are becoming very unfashionable. Coupled with the slowness inherent to the technology, slow when compared with the responsiveness of Twitter at least, the future doesn't look particularly promising. Thankfully, several projects are underway, aiming to bring the technology up to date or take a new approach to feeds like the Lazyfeed service, which just went live for everyone, bringing together a blog aggregator and a feed reader.
The service was launched last month in private beta and development has continued throughout, with Lazyfeed now boasting one million blogs in its database, 10 times as much as when it was first launched. The idea behind the site is that users shouldn't have to search for the topics they're interested in or wait for the content to arrive by other means, their friends, Twitter etc.
After signing up for the service, users just have to enter the subjects they want to keep up with and Lazyfeed will continually update them with posts related to them from any number of blogs. This way users don't have to actually subscribe to any feed to make sure they get the content they want but if they do find a blog that is of interest to them they can add it to their favorites.
The best part of the service though is that the content comes in real time, not waiting for the regular feeds, which can take up to several hours to update, to reach the users. Lazyfeed uses a proprietary technology for this and it isn't clear how much it takes for the content to reach the user since it was initially published. Still, it is faster than the regular feeds and, with other technologies like Pubsubhubbub promising much faster feeds, it should help this distribution method keep up with the faster alternatives.