I've just started playing with Google Chrome, Google's new browser. Its strengths are impressive, but I was disappointed to see no support, as yet, for reading RSS feeds. They display as text, with all tags stripped out, and no semblance of readability. As an example, here's RSS4Lib's RSS 2.0 feed:

Given that Google already has a way to display RSS feeds on a web page, it seems odd to me that it didn't make its way into the first public beta of Chrome. Even the iPhone version of Safari (which similarly does not include a built-in RSS reader) redirects RSS feeds to a web page, hosted by Apple, that renders the feed as an HTML page. For an example that only works from an iPhone (or if you can set your browser's user-agent string to "iPhone") see Apple's rendering of the RSS4Lib feed.

I'm hopeful that a forthcoming release of Chrome will include some capability to read display RSS feeds within the browser.

RSS Mixer, a recently released as an "alpha", lets you create an account, input one or more RSS feeds, and gives you a combined output. Once you've set up an account (using OpenID or a one-off account at the site), entering feeds to mix is straightforward. The user interface is available in eight languages (there's a language link in the site's footer). Choices include German, English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese.

Mixed feeds can be tagged and shared -- there are built-in widgets for mobile versions, creating web widgets, emailing a mixed feed to a friend, and exporting a mix as an OPML file, in addition to the version viewable on the RSS Mixer site -- for example, an ego search for RSS4Lib.

One thing I noticed is that sorting in mixes is odd. In the above two-feed mix (comprised of RSS4Lib's RSS feed and a Technorati search feed for "rss4lib"), an RSS4Lib entry is sometimes followed by one or more posts discovered by Technorati about that particular entry. Other times, the Technorati post comes first. In all cases, though, the RSS4Lib entry was posted before anyone could comment on it -- sorting should be consistent, whatever the algorithm is.

By further mashing up RSS Mixer's output, it is possible to create a keyword search across multiple specific feeds. FeedSifter (reviewed here in July 2008) lets you searching a feed for one or more keywords. As a test of this, I used RSS Mixer to create a combined feed out of about 55 RSS- and library-related feeds. I then used FeedSifter to limit that to anything in that mixed feed that mentions metadata.

It would not surprise me if searching were on the drawing board for a future version of RSS Mixer, but there's no indication of this functionality now.

Reading RSS on Amazon's Kindle reader through the web browser can be slow and inefficient. There's a new tool, kindlefeeder.com that automates the process by sending you, by email, the RSS feeds you wish to read.

Once you've created an account at kindlefeeder.com and entered your Kindle user name, you then enter the RSS feeds that you wish to have mailed to you. The feeds are then gathered, converted into a Kindle-friendly format, and sent to your Kindle email account on your handheld device.

The author of this tool, Daniel Choi, also built an open-source tool called kindle-feeds that allows anyone to set up a similar feed service for their own Kindle.