It’s really easy to add an RSS feed to your start page or desktop, but we were looking for an easy way to let people add an RSS feed from their favorite sites to their own home pages or social profiles. We came across a really great tool: WidgetBox. Instead of coding our own Flash RSS widget that we could give our visitors to embed on their home pages, we found a ton of cool options for widgetizing lots of existing content.

What’s even better, WidgetBox lets you turn any widget-sized HTML web page into an embeddable widget that can be shared with users in a friendly manner. Sadly, these widgets still aren’t MySpace-friendly. But the WidgetBox does offer an intriguing wizard for creating Facebook apps out of your widgets.

WidgetBox also offers a very simple but flexible “blidget”, an RSS-reading widget with options for size, colors, and presentation. Just type in the URL of your blog

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Ever run across a website that just looks like crap on a mobile web browser? Download Squad is optimized for viewing on a small screen, but many web sites aren’t. Sure, you could spend a lot of time tweaking a site’s style sheet, but there’s an easier way.

MoFuse lets you make a mobile version of pretty much any site. The entire process basically boils down to:

1. Create an account
2. Name your site
3. Enter the RSS feed
4. Tweak if you like

In other words, it takes about a minute to create a custom, mobile version of any web site. While the service is great for web publishers (WordPress users can even add auto-redirect tags to their site so that users on mobile browsers will be sent to the MoFuse version), you can also use it to make mobile versions of websites that you don’t own. Tired of struggling to read your favorite site on your Treo? Just mobilize it.

But there’s one potential problem with that last part. MoFuse also lets you monetize mobile sites by placing AdSense or AdMob content on mobile pages. If you’re placing advertising on your own site, that’s great. But if you’re putting ads on a site registered to someone else and then publicizing and profiting from the feed? Well, that could cause some legal issues, don’t you think?

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Social networks are certainly popular and useful these days, but if there’s one annoyance they’ve created it would have to be the abundance of unsolicited emails that they produce. Unlike spam, which is unsolicited email for products and services you have nothing to do with, many are referring to the emails generated by social networks and the like as “bac’n”. Basically, it’s a more legitimate form of unsolicited email because you have some sort of relationship with the host service.

Most of these services grow in large part by finding ways to engineer their users into inviting as many friends as possible. In Twitter’s case, the only way to find out if one of your friends is using the service is to send them an invitation. While I’m sure this is quite effective for Twitter, it’s also a bit nasty.

If you’ve been hesitant to spam, sorry, “bac’n” your friends with signup requests for Twitter (a service they may have little or no interest in), you might be happy to learn that some enterprising individuals have generated TwitterSearch. With TwitterSearch you can enter a list of email addresses, and it will return links to each person’s Twitter page that it can find.

This is a tool that really ought to be built in to Twitter, and it should be able to link in to your email address book the same way Facebook and other social tools do. In fact, it probably will, sooner or later.

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If you’re starting your own blog, there’s no question that WordPress is one of the most customizable, powerful blogging platforms around. But Google’s blogger is attractive because it doesn’t require a hosting solution, and it’s ridiculously easy to use.

On the other hand, there are hundreds of plugins for WordPress that just don’t work with Blogger. That’s starting to change, and it’s not necessarily because Google is rolling out support for new features. No, it’s because developers are moving away from hosted scripts and offering up javascript based applications.

ShareThis is a popular WordPress plugin that puts a little “share this” icon near every post on your blog. Click it and you get the option to email the post to your friends or submit it to several popular social bookmarking sites..

Up until recently, you could only install ShareThis on WordPress blogs. But now the company has released ShareThis 2.0, which is a javascript version that works with Blogger as well. Well, almost works. Right now there’s an error that prevents ShareThis from showing up on more than one post per page. But the team is working to fix that problem.

ShareThis 2.0 loads slower than ShareThis 1.0, but because of the redesign, you can track how people are using your ShareThis icons. If you’d rather install the old version of the plugin, it’s still available.

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What the world needs is another RSS feed reader, and specifically one that is 3D. Heck, isn’t any productivity application made better if you can add the word 3D to it?

Sarcasm aside, Voyage is actually a fairly compelling take on a 3D feed reader. Headlines float nebulously in space in varying layers. The ones closest to you are easiest to read, and they get smaller and fuzzier as they go off into the distance. Clicking on a headline (on any layer) will zoom to that layer and expand a story synopsis.

Stories that are further away are older, a fact that can be seen by watching the horizontal timeline that bisects the screen. Using your keyboard’s up and down arrows you can travel into the past, or back towards the present. You can also directly click on a headline that is in a layer beneath the one you are currently looking at; the interface will zoom to the layer and show you the synopsis you’ve selected.

Voyager defaults to a number of popular RSS feeds, but you are free to delete them and use your own feeds. Unfortunately, there is no bulk upload functionality, so you can only add feeds one at a time.

At this stage Voyage is fun to play with for a few minutes, but doesn’t appear to be ready for any RSS feed heavy lifting.

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