The Path of Stuff. Reading, Saving and Sharing in the Wild RSS

Consider this a thinking-out-loud post. I'm trying to consolidate things that I find interesting online, and have a pretty big batch of services floating around to help with the task. I thought it'd be neat to highlight this stuff as you might find at least a couple of them useful in your own day-to-day web surfing life.

This is part recommendations, part comedy as you'll see just how many different apps are in use here.

 

How do I find Stuff?

There's a handful of websites that regularly post awesome content. Anything I like, I save the RSS feed into Google Reader. This is pretty much the center of my internet experience, and I tap into it from a few different places.

• Feedly, a beautiful, slick web based reader for my browser
• Snackr, an Adobe Air based app that scrolls on my desktop
• Reeder, a great iOS app that caches content for on-the-go reading

All of these sync with Google Reader, and have the ability to tag items to read later (and send it to instapaper for easy reading), or share to social networks.

Stuff also comes to me through my social circles. When you're following a buttload of people though, it's hard to keep up. That's where Summify comes in. This automatically curates and shows me the top content being shared around. Think of it as a private version of Paper.li, without the obnoxious auto-posting.

 

What do I do with Stuff?

What usually happens is that I'll tweet items I like, either from my reader, from the article's social sharing buttons, or from the wicked simple Chrome plugin, Cortex. Sometimes if I really like something I'll post it to Facebook as well. My Google Plus feed gets no love, and that's part of what I'm trying to resolve.

 

Enter If This Then That. This is a roll your own intergration platform. It doesn't yet support Google Plus, but will probably be one of the first places to do so now that the API is out and about. What I plan on doing here is enabling a recipie to automatically cross-post things straight from Google Reader just by clicking the (currently useless) Share button.

My own Stuff

With Posterous as my entry point of choice for my content, I've already got automatic sharing as an option. I set it up to cross-post to Blogger, which I consider as my "actual blog" while Posterous is sort of behind-the-scenes.

Twitterfeed then monitors RSS of a couple places where my content lands, and automatically posts from there as well. Pretty sweet.

The history of Stuff

Cortex keeps a history of things you shared with Cortex, but nothing else. Bit.ly keeps a history of things that went through it using your API key, but I usually forget to Bitly-ify my links, and I prefer to track analytics on just my own content anyway. I haven't been saving items in Google Reader to begin with. So how can I look back on stuff?

Tadah. Trunkly! This automatically scoops up everything I've shared, no matter how I shared it. It gives a master RSS feed which is pretty useful when you're looking for something from your social history. I looped this puppy back into my Reader for refernce, as well as plugged it on my Blogger sidebar so visitors can see what I've been up to.

Aaaaand I think that's about it. Quite the ecosystem, eh? I'm looking forward to simplifying my flow of Stuff, and especially to getting things onto Google Plus so I can stop looking completely inactive on that particular network. What's your path of Stuff? Using tools I didn't mention? Know how to get Stuff to Google Plus? Share em in the comments!