(Screenshot: Google Reader)

Fretful newshounds and anxious bloggers can stop sitting shiva. Digg, or rather Betaworks' reboot of old Digg, wants to resurrect yet another ailing online mainstay. On its blog this afternoon, the startup announced it would be building a reader to replace the "much-loved, if under-appreciated" Google Reader.

In the post, Andrew McLaughlin, the former vice president of Tumblr who joined Betaworks as an entrepreneur-in-residence last summer, said Reader's "early social features were forward-thinking and hugely useful." However, as with the revamped Digg, the new iteration won't look exactly like its predecessor:

"We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting. Don’t get us wrong: we don’t expect this to be a trivial undertaking. But we’re confident we can cook up a worthy successor."

He also assured fans of the revamped Digg--and the traffic it brings!--that this won't impinge on their aggregator, implying it will function separately.

Betaworks already has some skin in the reader game. It owns a piece of the real-time tech company Superfeeder, which fetches and parses RSS or Atom feeds, as well as Bloglovin', a service that lets you know when the blogs you want to follow are updated. Both startups made a plea to bereft Google Reader acolytes today. It's also worth noting that Betaworks companies do tend to collaborate--like Bitly and Chartbeat.

In cased you missed all the service journalism, there are already a myriad of alternatives--although it's hard not to watch them fall short when compared to the "800-pound gorilla in the RSS space." As a positive sign for Digg's own attempt at a better reader, the company is welcoming input from the yearning masses, struggling to blog free. Says Mr. McLaughlin:

In order to pull this off in such a small window, we’re going to need your help. We need your input on what you want to see in a reader. What problems should it solve for you? What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you wish it could do that it can’t today?

Fair warning to Digg, you're soliciting input from a pretty vociferous bunch, who could give a shit whether their problems are universal concerns.

Bloggers who have spent years painstakingly curating feeds, lovingly organizing them into folders based on urgency and topic, may have even come to think of their top-secret feed resources as the modern day counterpart to the source rolodex. Asking to see a fellow blogger's Google Reader is basically like asking them to share their sources--something that many would feel territorial about.

Though many may decry the downfall of RSS, for those who spend time sorting through large swaths of information and consuming as many news items as possible, Reader was a simplified way to sort through the noise (though that 1,000+ number was always pretty overwhelming).

The Betaworks team seems well-suited to revive RSS. In fact, they might want to make Lazarusing web 1.0 a full-time thing. Guess that would make them Internet Jesus?

Ms. Mason

We've expected some big (data) developements from Bitly since the New York startup announced a $15 million Series C led by Khosla Ventures July. Today, chief data scientist Hilary Mason is finally ready to show you what they're working with, empirically speaking.

The company announced the launch of three new data APIs that will radically boost the utility of the service for consumers and business clients. And it's not even your birthday, data nerds!

There's a real-time search API, open to any Bitly user. The company is also opening up an API for content analysis and a "bursting phrases" or "attention spikes" API that functions sort of like Twitter's "trending topics." Obviously APIs are geared toward third-party developers to incorporate into their products and build complimentary applications. However, any Bitly user can play around with some of that new-and-vastly-improved functionality using a demo interface at rt.ly.com. "We're data hackers, not UI designers," Ms. Mason warned us, but the site is very user-friendly.

Go to rt.ly and you'll find a number of filters that let you search all Bitly links by city, social network it was shared on, key words, languages, and even topics. You can also "create a story" for a particular search, like our favorite subject "Eric Schmidt," [see below]. That pops up a report with a map showing click rate, the geographical distribution of readers, link referrers, related stories, top domains, and more. "People who are really social web savvy have been using this already to discover the kind of content they might want to share or if they are writing content to see how it’s being distributed," she told Betabeat by phone.

It's obvious after spending some time on rt.ly that Bitly thinks about search differently than your standard Google query. "Our search lets you do things like describe the criteria you’re interested in and then just see what’s popular in that subset right now. An example--and one that I like to show off--is links about the topic food being clicked statistically disproportionately from Brooklyn. So you get a lot of the artisanal pickle style stuff and restaurant reviews."

Bitly's search function is also distinguished by its emphasis on real-time. "There’s the stream and we just sort of let you filter it and watch content pop in as it becomes popular and drop out as people stop paying attention to it," she said.

The interface also lets users peek at the content Bitly analyzes on the other side at the other side of its shortened link. "We do things like pull out the key phrases in that content and pull out the topics," she said.

The "bursting phrases" API is a even more complex. "Basically we calculate the click rate across all of Bitly's data on every web page containing any significant phrase in every language that we track," she said. "What that lets us do is look for the phrases that are getting a disproportionate amount of attention right now." It's sort of like Twitter's trending topics, she explained, in that, "we can tell you what people are paying attention to that we did not expect based on historical behavior."

Some of the data revealed by the new social APIs will start to show up on Bitly.com, she said. "You can expect to see much better stats for consumers that will draw off of this data, as well as better discovery tools on the enterprise side and audience analysis tools."

Ms. Mason didn't seem anxious about Twitter's sudden zeal for cracking down on third-party apps. "We’re always concerned about it but because of the way Bitly works--you wrap the link in a Bitly link before you share it on Twitter--we haven’t had to deal with any of those issues," she said. Even after Twitter started shortening links, 30 percent of all links shared on the service are still powered by Bitly. The company powers around 30,000 different domains for people. "The examples we usually give are the New York Times, the Dalai Lama, and Mariah Carey on the celebrity side," she added. "So it’s not all bit.ly links by a lot."

Besides, she noted, Bitly isn't all about Twitter. "We see almost the same amount of data for Facebook as well." Any links shared privately, however, won't be exposed by the API.

Developers chomping at the bit to work with Bitly's API will have a chance at a hackathon at its office next week, although the exact dates and times haven't been around.

If all this data is too much for you to handle, you can always take the old school approach, as Ms. Mason reminded us. Add a plus sign to any Bitly link and it takes you to a stats page for just that article.

Mr. Snyder (linkedin.com)

With all of the different social services we use today, there's still no platform that can unify all of our check-ins, tweets and photos into one cohesive narrative. Gopogo, a new startup out of New York that has raised $3M in seed funding, wants to change that.

Gopogo is a location-based service that launched its beta version yesterday; it allows you to connect your various social media accounts through "strings" overlayed on a map, that allow you to assemble a coherent narrative about your daily adventures.

"There is a whitespace out there in the mobile social local convergence," Jason Snyder, Gopogo's founder and CTO, told Betabeat by phone. "There's Foursquare and you can check in, and you can check in on Facebook and share things on Google+ and put your pictures on Instagram, but all those things where you're sharing your experiences--none of them are connected in any meaningful way and there’s no way of really recording that. Life doesn’t exist that way."

Mr. Snyder said that he thinks Gopogo can help provide important context around the myriad social messages we relay daily.

"What exists today is just lists of stuff--top 10 bagels or whatever--and that’s not about living life," he said. "With Gopogo, the opportunity is for people to go out and go do what they're going to do and share a story about that, bundle it all up so they can record it and share it all."

It sounds like a noble endeavor, but we were a little thrown off by Gopogo's introduction video, which shows a mustache puppet using strings to stalk a girl in a red wig. So is this just another stalking tool?

"No it’s not a world’s stalking tool at all," said Mr. Snyder. "It’s very different than that. Privacy is first and foremost. People share what they choose to share and our model is very much like a Twitter model, where you can connect to people and be able to send a DM and be able to see all their info once they connect back to you. You can save things to your own profile and library and you can choose to share them with just friends or with everyone."

Gopogo is only in beta, but has some exciting stuff planned for the future, including a mobile app and integration with vehicles.

"We took the Gopogo idea and moved it out and said, 'America is a big place, New York’s the capital of the world but for a lot of other cities that’s super important'-- I wanted to have folks be able to load that into their car, the way they can with Pandora or Open Table."

Though Mr. Snyder helped build out Gopogo and currently serves as its CTO, his main focus was to incubate and launch the product, and he'll actually be leaving the team to pursue other mobile projects.

"I’ve launched this thing, brought it to life and I’m very very happy about it. Now I’m going to be looking forward to moving on to other innovations and looking at other mobile projects," he added.

A screenshot from Glo Bible's new retina display app (globible.com)

You know what's boring? Books. You know what's super boring? Old, religious books. Like the Bible! No thousand-page text is going to tear us from our Draw Something games any time soon. What the Bible really needs is a digital makeover, stat. Enter Glo Bible, an iPad app with an updated retina display that makes Jesus like, way more interesting.

Glo Bible is one of the many apps available in the iTunes store that seek to 'modernize' the Bible by making it more social. Because nothing says "I'm a serious disciple of Christ" like tweeting a quote from Corinthians.

This new app is really great because if there's anything our Facebook feeds need more of, it's daily musings about how "Thou shall not commit adultery" immediately following a link to an article from Esquire about how your wife needs to fuck better.

But really, if you're into the whole religious thing, which we are clearly not, Glo Bible seems like a neat way to turn something really old into something really new. We can see how its interactivity features, like maps, videos and photos, could go a long way in helping to get young people interested. Just please don't flood our Twitter streams with Bible verses, okay?

Birds do it, bees do it, portals up in silly trees do it

Earlier this week Yahoo announced a major integration with ABC. The struggling internet portal finds its stock in the gutter, its internal management in shambles and bankers circling like vultures to break it into pieces they can sell off to the highest bidder. The one thing Yahoo still has in spades is a massive audience.

What's really interesting, however, is that ABC is not just interested in connecting with the vast number of eyeballs Yahoo can send from its 25 million daily visitors. It's also intrigued by the kind of social traffic that the big news networks are keen on tapping into. As The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal points out:

Here at the Washington Ideas Forum, the heads of ABC, NBC, and CBS took to the stage for a panel moderated by our James Fallows. Alongside the discussions of international reportage and the politicization of news, ABC president Ben Sherwood provided an interesting rationale for his outfits expanded partnership with Yahoo. Here's the thing. As explained by Sherwood, the deal was not an effort to reach (large) Yahoo's audience per se.

Yahoo, he said, was the largest provider of news items that were shared on Twitter and Facebook. Ergo, "If we are the primary news provider to Yahoo, we'll be the primary news provider on Facebook and Twitter," Sherwood said.

What Yahoo needs is a clear path forward. Embracing its role as portal and building out better tools and analytics for the news properties to which it drives so many visitors doesn't sound like a bad plan. Better than trying, and failing repeatedly, to build its own brand of original content that connects with an audience advertisers will pay a premium for.

“If we ask somebody on the street, ‘What’s the top news brand?’ Would they say Yahoo news?” Mickie Rosen, the senior vice president who oversees Yahoo’s media properties, told the NY Times. “The honest answer is they probably wouldn’t.”