As I mentioned in this morning's post, "ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items", I was lucky enough to stumble upon a new service that seemingly had no named developer, and had no records of existing, as far as Google was concerned. It didn't even have a domain name! Yet, despite its relative obscurity, ReadBurner took its first 24 hours in the public eye and made the most of it. I'm excited to see where this could go, and now, we have more to the story.

The site's developer is Alexander Marktl, who hails from Vienna, Austria. (See his profile on Facebook, LinkedIn or FriendFeed)

While his day job is as a user experience designer for Qoove, an invoicing software service for small companies, Alexander had made ReadBurner his hobby, and it wasn't supposed to go live as quickly as it did, but as he writes in the site's new "About" page, "In the Internet you cannot hide anything that's leaked, so be it."

I can't help but feel partially responsible.


Today's most popular shared items, with sharers...

But while the morning's coverage was a surprise, he's taken the early launch as an opportunity to get serious. Today, ReadBurner got the domain name it truly deserves, at www.readburner.com. Alexander also quickly started a blog for the site at readburner.wordpress.com, and in the space of a few hours, did some amazing work, tidying up the Web site, removing feed item duplicates, and showing which people had shared specific items. Keep in mind Google Reader is just now figuring out how to do the last two, and this should be their sweet spot!

Make no mistake about it. The site is still in alpha. As it's just Alexander building the site, he admits he still has work to do to find a better way to present the content. But I think he's doing a pretty darn good job for one day's efforts. We're excited to see this, and are astounded that one guy, with one day's effort, from Vienna, Austria, can do what a few thousand engineers in Mountain View haven't done yet. It's got to be because Google doesn't want to do it.

Until Google gets their act together, we're delighted ReadBurner is here. With ReadBurner, AssetBar, FriendFeed and Spokeo out there, it's a real sign that innovation in this market is alive and well.

It's amazing to me how many people are eager to call a winner after one small state, in some of the most unorthodox voting procedures known to man, made its selection of two candidates to receive delegates, representing a miniscule portion of the totals needed to declare a winner.

While Obama and Huckabee were not necessarily the front-runners three months ago or six months ago, and it was clear both the Clinton campaign and Romney campaign had hoped for more than they received, not to mention the campaigns for Edwards, Giuliani or Thompson, one loss does not indicate it's all over.

Yet, I can't seem to read a single story on the New Hampshire primary that doesn't have some side element of how Hillary might drop out if she loses to Obama here, or that Mitt Romney's campaign is teetering on the brink of disaster. It's completely asinine. And the ensuing tidal wave of "what day will Hillary give up?" stories, with everybody jumping on the Obama bandwagon, is driving me a little nuts.

Yes, tradition has it that Iowa and New Hampshire go first. Great. But if you think this political contest is over, when delegate-rich states like California, Texas and Florida haven't even entered the voting booth, then something is terribly wrong. A whole swath of states is set to make a real impact in early February on Super Tuesday. California specifically made this move so we would be part of the process. Heck, I remember we used to hold our primaries in June! And yet, it'd just be easier for the media and the TV gasbags to declare a winner after one vote. Ridiculous.

If you want to get it all over with in one swoop, then maybe the right thing to do is have a national primary for both parties on the same day to choose a nominee. If not, then let the people vote. Let the people who work behind desks have as much impact as those who work behind tractors and quiet down already. And Hillary? Romney? Please don't think of giving up. Yet. The political process needs continued discussion. We have hardly begun.

The story at FriendFeed is getting better and better. As of this morning, the head UI guru behind GMail, Google Calendar and Google Reader has joined up with FriendFeed, and will work with the team to make FriendFeed have the best user interface out there, further enhancing what's already an amazing product I'm using all day long.

Kevin's leaving Google raised a lot of interest in the blogosphere, and as they say, there's no rest for the wicked. Just days after saying he was leaving Google, he's started his new gig. I'm glad to see he's teamed up with some of the brightest people in the business to continue improving one of my favorite services.

See the announcement here: Another new FriendFeeder! and see Kevin's note here.

Now, I can finally send FriendFeed some suggestions I had for their look and feel. Believe me, I've considered it, but hadn't done so yet. I'll give Kevin a few weeks, and then look out!

While Google remains silent on highlighting most popular shared items within Google Reader, and still has not provided a directory for shared link blogs, other innovative developers are filling the gap. ReadBurner, a service just now entering private alpha, might be the next to challenge TechMeme or Google on their home turf, once they exit the development stages.

As Feedheads has successfully demonstrated with its Facebook app, there is a market for people looking for most popular shared items, and finding new people sharing what they read on Google Reader. Just a few months ago, Mario Romero's application reached 10,000 users. But to date, there's been no "Real Internet" solution outside of Facebook.

Enter ReadBurner. It's obvious where they got the name, combining Google Reader and FeedBurner. They even have Google's colors in the logo.

(Good luck to you legally on that unless this is a Google skunkworks project, which I doubt, given it's hosted on Amazon Web Services and using EC2...)

ReadBurner, starting with a few dozen link blogs from popular Web personalities, including Chris Brogan, Mihai Parparita, Chris Wetherell, Robert Scoble, Scott Beale, myself and others, esentially tabulates the shared items from each feed, creating areas for "Recent" shared items, those "Popular Today", "Popular This Week" and "Popular All Time".

There are not yet any details who is behind the service, although I've seen accesses here via the site from Vienna, Austria. Google finds no hits on "ReadBurner" related to the service. But it looks like it started indexing shared items in December of 2007. And the more shared link feeds you provide, the more complete the service will be.

You can see which shared reader feeds are included (as a tag cloud), and you can even submit your own to be included. While clearly in private alpha, and not likely expected to be blogged about yet, the service is doing exactly what we asked Google Reader to do almost a year ago. In the ten months since we laid out specific requests, Google Reader team has really lost its way in the court of public opinion. It's time to get that back, or services like ReadBurner are going to find a niche and grow.

As for the service's eventual domain name? Who knows? Internic and GoDaddy both told me ReadBurner.com is available. If they want it, they had better act fast.