I miss a lot Vox's "explore neighbour" functionality.
While it is true that Typepad has a list of "followed" person's activity, it is no match: many times, interesting posts get lost, in between dozens and dozens of comments from anybody on anything
(Typepad non ha un equivalente della funzionaltia' "explore neighbour" di Vox. E' vero, nel dashboard c''e modo di seguire le attività degli amici, ma spesso risulta essere un elenco infinito di commenti su ogni cosa, e i post vanno persi (nel senso che sono troppe pagine indietro)).
But now there's a solution, that also is useful for keeping track of interesting websites updates.
Just download the free "NetNewsWire" application (on the Mac) or the free "FeedlerRSS" applet on the iPad.
Then "sync" them with your google account.
Once you "tell" either google, NetNewsWire or Feedler what sites or blogs are interesting for you, it will automatically present a list of all activities, as well as let you browse them directly
(la soluzione sono i lettori di feed RSS, tra cui trovo bellissimi i gratuiti NetNewsWire su mac o Feedler su iPad. E' sufficiente sincronizzarli con il proprio account Google, e aggiungere la lista dei sito e dei blog che si vuole seguire, per avere sempre un elenco degli aggiornamenti di questi siti).
Here is an example of the screen you can get from Feedler:
In the left column you have the list of the items I follow. Among them
- "A Nice PX time" (my blog onto typepad)
- "Almost blue in reverse" (a blog on blogger)
- Antos'bubble (Antos blog on Typepad)
- "I Cringley" and "the gadget expert" (both blogs on Wordpress)
- MacDaily News (a Website about the mac)
After clicking (or tapping) on one of them, I can get a list of recent posts in the right box. In this example, i had tappen onto LeicaCats blog, and I can see all of his recent posts: "Tokyo Waterfront", etc. The one with the blue circle are the ones that I did not look at from within this applications (in fact I had already looked at them via browser).
Once I tap (or click) in the right box onto a blog title, I can look at them full screen as shown here:
and if I tap onto the title Safari starts up on the same blog entry as well (in case I need it for some reason).
How do I tell these application what sites and blogs interest me ?
Easy, just look for the RSS symbol, or a link called "subscribe" onto the blogs. As an example, here is the symbol on maya's blog:
(it is the "abbonez-vous" link on the bottom left in this partiucular case). You will get a URL that looks like this: http://sometimesyouwakeup.typepad.com/blog/atom.xml
Just press the "+" button (on bottom left).
Final note: you can get the same functionality from "google reader", but the "user experience" is much better with the clients I mentioned, letting google only keep track of your feeds (therefore syncing feeds among MAC, iPad etc)