New data that TechCrunch released today, however, suggests that RSS might actually be headed toward the mainstream. TechCrunch, which is one of the most widely read blogs on the Internet, has about 1.4 million RSS subscribers. Two years ago, when that number was much smaller, Firefox, Bloglines, and Newsgator were the three most used RSS readers. Now, though, 38% of TechCrunch readers user Outlook to access the feed — making it the most popular RSS reader for the blog by a wide margin. Google Reader was next, followed by Newsgator and BlogRovR.

That could suggest that RSS is starting to go mainstream, since Outlook is the email client used by a large number of mainstream web users. However, that’s just one blog’s readership. At SitePoint, we’re not seeing that same trend repeated with our admittedly smaller RSS readership. Google Reader is still far and away the most popular RSS reader among SitePoint readers, according to our feed stats, followed by Firefox and Bloglines.

So it could be that TechCrunch has just gained a larger following among corporate users over the past two years, who access the blog at work where Outlook is their only option. Whereas SitePoint tends to attract more freelancers and contract workers who have freedom over what software they use.

Either way, we’d love to here what RSS reader you use, and what readers people are using to access your feed (if you have a blog). Let us know in the comments below and vote in our poll.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

One way they could do that, is by allowing users to rate, reorder, and comment on search results, teaching the search engine over time what types of sites you like. Google tonight will be opening up to the public an experimental feature they’ve been testing for a few months called SearchWiki, reports CNET.

SearchWiki lets users reorder and remove results, and leave comments on specific links. Google will remember changes that people make to search results pages, and subsequent searches will display results with the user’s customizations and notes. Users will also have the option of seeing how other searchers have rated and reordered search results and view other people’s notes, making search results a collaborative effort.

In some ways, the process is reminiscent of Wikia Search, the collaborative search engine launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, which allows searchers to edit, annotate, and comment on search results. We also reported on a project in October from Microsoft Research Japan called “U Rank,” that allowed users to rank and reorder search results in a collaborative environment.

According to CNET, Google seemed open using human input gathered via SearchWiki to improve their general search algorithm, though stopped short of saying that was something they were planning to do. “We don’t close any doors,” said Cedric Dupont, product manager for Google’s SearchWiki, who said they look at all sorts of signals regarding how to better tweak their search algorithm. “Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they’d like to see their search results.”

The video below demonstrates SearchWiki in action.

Backpack, a great application from 37signals, is probably where you should start. It’s a must have too for any freelancer’s arsenal that allows you to keep everything together. You can organize all the details of a client project on a Backpack page and then share that page with your client to keep them in the loop about what’s happening. You can even give them edit permissions so they can make changes or give you feedback as the project progresses.

A Y Combinator startup from a team of ex-Googlers that launched today with a good deal of fanfare, EtherPad enables dead-simple collaborative writing. Users can write together on the same document, in real time and see what every other party collaborating changes as they change it. It’s a great app that can be used along with Skype for hashing out project specifications with clients. Make sure you have all the details right from the start and avoid headaches down the road.

Sometimes, you need to share more than a simple text document with a client. Maybe you need to walk a client through changes made to their app, train them up on how to enter content into that new CMS, or show them a presentation of logo design pitches. Whatever the reason, when you need to demo something, you need Dimdim, a robust, open source screen sharing and web meeting application.

Often times, during a project you’ll need to send files back and forth with a client. Email is no good for larger files, and a private FTP server might be over your client’s head. We like senduit for passing files back and forth. It’s super simple and has a generous 100mb limit. Files are destroyed after a set period of time (30 minutes to one week) so you don’t have to worry about private client information leaking out.

When you’re working with multiple clients, it is easy to lose track of what needs doing. RememberTheMilk is one of the original to-do list web apps and remains one of the best. It’s simple, easy to use, works across a variety of platforms, and lists can be shared with clients so they can be kept abreast of your progress or add or clarify items if necessary.

One thing you’ll definitely want to take pains in communicating to your clients is how much you work you’ve completed and how long it took you to get it done. We recommend Harvest, a time-tracking application that also handles the invoicing and billing of your clients. If you make it a point to tie time tracking into other client communications, they’ll never expect that they owe you less than they do.

Faxing maybe a fairly old school method, but sometimes it’s still necessary (as in, for faxing signed contracts). If you only fax very occasionally, it might not make sense to invest in a fax machine. Instead, use FaxZero to send faxes for free. If you need to receive them as well, use jConnect to do that for free.

Now that you’re doing all this communicating, you’ll need to keep track of who you’re communicating with, what was said, and who needs to be called back. Highrise, another application from 37signals, is great for keeping track of everyone. It’s a customer relationship manager and address book tool that’s designed around the concept of tying tasks to people (i.e., “I have to reply to an email from Professor X, re: my beef with Wolverine”).

This one is for designers. Emailing concepts back and forth with clients, and waiting on their reply for feedback is clumsy. It leads to confusing emails like, “I like this part of Concept A, but this part of Concept B. If you could merge Concept A with Concept C, and use the colors from Concept B, I think we’d be closer.” Ahh! Enter ConceptShare, a web application specifically created to get feedback on designs, keep it organized, and make it easier to collaborate on design projects. Keep your client involved in the feedback process every step of the way and eliminate headaches (and up your chances of scoring repeat business!).

For those who work on large projects, senduit might not cut it for passing files back and forth. If you’re buried in files from clients, you need an asset management application like Fluxiom. Fluxiom is a super slick web-based asset manager that great for working with large, sprawling projects that have a lot of pieces to keep under control.

According to Wikipedia, the idea was first introduced in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin. “I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you,” he wrote in a letter to Benjamin Webb, to whom he’d loaned money. “When you […] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro’ many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.”

That concept of progressive reciprocity recently struck long-time SitePoint Forums member Dave Dalton, and drove him to create a marketplace for pay it forward scenarios called HelpingKind.org. He soft launched the new web site this week.

“It all started with a friend that had some medical problems and couldn’t take care of a few things around the house,” says Dalton. Rather than hiring someone to fix some problems the friend was having around his house, a few other friends got together on a Sunday afternoon and lent a helping hand. Dalton says the experience brought his group of friends closer together and it felt good to help relieve a little stress from a family in need.

“After [that day] I could only think about the ‘old days’,” he says, “the days when an entire community would come together when one member of that community was in need. Your barn burned down? Within days the entire town was there to help you build another one. Why? Because everyone in that community knew it could very well have been their barn!”

The idea of “people helping people” is an old one, says Dalton, but one that he thinks still has plenty of relevance today. So he spent the better part of the past month building HelpingKind.org as a marketplace for good samaritans. Users can post needs when they’re in need of help, and are encouraged to promise to repay that good deed with future good deeds (or barter with helpers using donations of in-kind helpfulness), if they can. Others can surf the marketplace for people in need of some help.

“If we can all reach out to everyone we know whether they are in need or can help we can build this site into a massive network of people helping each other, a network of communities realizing an ‘old school’ principle that still works today,” Dalton told me. “Taking an hour or two out of our daily rituals to assist someone else not only helps that person it binds a community together. It brings people together in a special way that enhances every ones life. It rekindles the idea that people, no matter how rich or poor, no matter how complicated their lives, are each others neighbors and together make a strong community.”

The idea may seem over idealistic, and maybe it is. But we applaud Dalton’s effort and wish him luck. He faces a chicken-and-egg problem at the outset in terms of content. It is hard to foster participation without content, and hard to get content without users participating, so for now, the site feels a bit empty.

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The results aren’t particularly surprising, though. Arrington himself famously wrote last April, “I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” Many people have come to rely on the service and the networks they have built for themselves through it. So it follows that a number of Twitter users would be willing to pay for the service.

In fact, in an April poll on TechCrunch, about 25% of respondents said they would pay to have ads removed on Twitter if they service started putting ads in the feed (and 50% supported the idea of ads — which might be a better way to generate revenue than to charge end users directly).

That said, a July interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams, also on TechCrunch, indicates that charging casual users is not something Twitter is planning on doing any time soon. So Arrington, who seems to have a short memory, need not worry. What they might be looking at, according to Williams in the interview, is charging corporate users.

Given the results of that April poll, it might be wise for Twitter to instead think about charging for ad-free accounts. Following the Get Satisfaction model, Twitter could likely do very well charging corporate users to remove third party advertising from their accounts.

Would you pay for Twitter? Let us know in the comments.

Another option: transactions. A new startup that launched today Twitpay, allows users to send and receive money via Twitter. The service handles transactions form $0.01 to $50. It takes a 5 cent fee on any transactions over 99 cents, and allows users to promise money to other Twitter users and have the transaction completed automatically once their accounted is funded to above the promised amount.

Speaking of Twitter, remember that you can get a free copy of SitePoint’s The Art & Science of CSS book just by following @sitepointdotcom on Twitter! Visit our Twitaway page for more details. You can also follow me @catone, though I can’t give you any free stuff.

“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” said NASA team leader Adrian Hook.

The DTN software is the fruition of a ten-year partnership between NASA and Vint Cerf, widely considered to be the “father of the Internet,” who is currently a vice president at Google. Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP protocol that serves as the foundation of the Internet. The DTN works in a different manner that TCP/IP in order to send data across such a wide expanse of space and deal with frequent disconnections and disruptions.

“Glitches can happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms and long communication delays occur. The delay in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half to 20 minutes at the speed of light,” according to a NASA press release.

Unlike TCP/IP, the DTN protocol never assumes that there will be a continuous connection, says NASA. If a destination path can’t be found, packets are held at the current node until a clear path is located, rather than discarded. That way, the information always eventually finds its way to its destination.

Current deep space communications are rather clumsy, requiring a team on the ground to manually direct each packet from point to point and tell it where to go. The DTN, however, allows all that to be done automatically.

In October, NASA initiated a month-long series of tests of the fledgling deep space Internet, which currently consists of 10 nodes. One node is the spacecraft Epoxi, which is on a two year mission to encounter the Comet Hartley. The other nine nodes are located on Earth at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory site in California and simulate Mars landers, orbiters, and operations centers that could be part of a future deployment of the network.

According to NASA, the new galactic Internet network could enable a number of new missions over the next few years in which reliable communication is paramount, such as space flights that involve multiple spacecraft. That also includes the possibility of sending humans back to the surface of the moon, where astronauts would need a method to communicate with Earth reliably. The next round of tests for the DTN will take place next summer, when the network software will be loaded onto the International Space Station.

Note on the image: Mozilla and Firefox don’t actually have anything to do with this project at NASA, as far as we know. We just thought the logos fit together nicely and communicated the concept well!

BrowserPlus offers developers a number of services, including persistent data store — which is one of the main selling points of Gears and AIR, drag and drop, file uploading, IRC chat, motion sensor control, and desktop messaging.

According to Yahoo!’s Lloyd Hilaiel, the goal with BrowserPlus is to “[fix] the web plug-in environment, making rapid experimentation possible.” Hilaiel thinks that browser plugins are great because they allow developers to extend the browser to do a range of new things, but the current system is broken. They’re difficult to write, installing them is a pain (who wants to restart your browser before you can access new content?), updating them is clumsy, and securing them is hard, he told attendees at the launch event according to a live blog at Ajaxian.

BrowserPlus, on the other hand, will allow developers to push new desktop functionality to users via web applications without the need to restart the browser, and updates can be pushed to users in the background without requiring them to reinstall anything. For the end-user, BrowserPlus would be a single install and additional developer services could be launched and pushed to them behind the scenes. Currently, only Yahoo! and their partners can launch new services on BrowserPlus.

Yahoo! is intending to open source BrowserPlus eventually. The Service API should be opened up by the end of this year, with everything else following in the middle of 2009.

“We want BrowserPlus to be portable, crash-proof, secure, and tiny,” says Hilaiel, who talked about a plethora of upcoming services that people are already discussing. “Folks on the forums are talking about peer-to-peer support. People are suggesting screen capture technology for better bug reporting. Webcam integration! Easy import of calendaring data! Drag-and-drop of Word documents! Bittorrent! There’s no shortage of ideas,” he said, noting that he’s excited to see what developers come up with once they have full access to the Service API.

Back in June, we wrote on SitePoint blogs that BrowserPlus was an important part of Yahoo!’s web OS play. “Yahoo already runs some of the most frequented web applications worldwide; add BrowserPlus and they can not only supercharge their applications, they can do it within their own platform. With BrowserPlus, the local OS suddenly became a lot less important,” wrote Akash Mehta.

The battle for the web platform is shaping up to be a battle of titans between Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Sun, and perhaps Facebook and Apple.

Frind’s site, of course, is using an ad-based business model, which is becoming harder to support in today’s shaky economy, so charging for your product might be a safer way to go. One of the most popular free-centric business models is the freemium model, in which base versions of products are given away for free, and more feature rich versions are charged for. The idea is that enough people will pony up for the fancy edition to pay for all the freeloaders, and turn a profit.

However, if Frind is right about ballooning costs as your user base doubles, even the freemium model has pitfalls.

Let’s do some simplified math. Say your users cost you $1 each per user, per year for hosting, acquisition, support, etc. Let’s say you have 100 total users, which means you’ll pay $100 each year in costs. Assume that just 1% of the users you sign up will turn into paying users at $10 per month (a figure that comes from Ryan Carson of DropSend), which equals $120/year on those 100 users — so you’re above water.

Now scale up to 200 users. If Frind is correct, you’ll actually end up with $1,200 per year in costs — you’ve doubled your user base, so your costs go up six time to $6/user. Your conversion rate likely won’t, however, so you’ll have just 2 paying customers and revenue of $240 per year. You’re now way, way in the red. Even if Frind is exaggerating, and costs only go up 50% with every doubling of your user base, free can still wind up costing you money. In our example, if your costs up 50% with every doubling, when you hit 400 users, they’ll cost your $900 per year, but only bring in half that in revenue.

Clearly, the math will be different for you — your per user costs might be lower, and the pricing on your app might be higher, and the costs might creep up at a slower pace. However, assuming costs do go up exponentially as you add more users, then it will eventually catch up to you. So the key is to up the conversion rate and if you can, to extract value from those free users.

The latter is what spam-filtering service Mollom is doing. Founder Dries Buytaert, who also founded the Drupal project, reports on his blog that Mollom is able to extract great value from the freeloaders on their system — who make up the vast majority of customers — by utilizing their input to make their paid product more useful.

“We currently have more than 3,000 active users that use Mollom for free,” writes Buytaert. “Say each user spends on average 15 minutes a week moderating his site’s content and reporting classification errors to Mollom. Mollom learns from this feedback and automatically adjusts its spam filters so that all other Mollom users benefit from it. At a rate of $10 USD/hour, we get $390,000 USD worth of value from free users a year — 3,000 users x 15 minutes/week x 52 weeks/year x 10 USD/hour = $390,000 USD/year. If these numbers hold up, the value of a free Mollom user could be estimated at $130 USD/year. And that doesn’t include the marketing value they add.”

Mollom users add value that makes the service more attractive to paid customers and ups the chance that they might choose Mollom over competing services, such as Akismet. Of course Buytaert concedes that “the value of a free user probably declines as you get more of them and the business becomes stronger.”

I believe he is referring to their marketing value — the more users you have, paid or free, the more potential brand ambassadors and the greater the chance of word-of-mouth success — but taken in context with Frind’s statement about costs skyrocketing with user numbers, the value of free users almost certainly declines the more of them you get.

Extracting value in the way Mollom does from freeloaders is one way to raise the conversion ratio, but it won’t work for every business. The other way is the find the sweet spot for the free version that offers just enough to keep people interested, but not enough that they’ll never upgrade. Finding that sweet spot requires experimentation and knowing what people will pay for.

In August, I wrote a blog post titled “Better Than Free,” in which I printed advice from Michael Galpert, one of the founders of online image editing tool suite Aviary (our coverage), about what people will pay for. I’ll reprint that advice below.

1. Convenience - People are lazy, says Galpert, which is why they’ll still pay for music tracks on iTunes, rather than get it from a P2P network. If you can offer them convenience over free alternatives, they’ll pay for it.
2. Quality - Access to higher quality content, products, support, or community features is something that people are willing to pay for. If a subscription fee keeps spammers out of a forum and makes it more attractive to industry professionals, then people will be willing to pony up the dough, for example.
3. Additional Functionality - Galpert cites 37signals, who have pioneered the “freemium” model on the web by giving away a free appetizer, but charging for the full meal. The danger, as Allen Stern points out, is knowing how much to give out so that your pay product is still an attractive upgrade for enough users.
4. Customization - Customization is a great value-added feature for many products, and people are willing to pay for it. Galpert uses Wordpress.com as an example. The site offers free blogs for anyone, but to customize the CSS or use your own domain name you have to fork over some cash.
5. Privacy - While privacy should be built into any service at any pay level, additional layers of privacy are something that people will pay for. Galpert talks about GoDaddy, which offers a premium service that allows people to mask their information on WHOIS searches.

What sorts of things can you offer your users to turn them into paying customers and reap the benefits of free?

CEO Isaac Garcia told me that although Central Desktop has always targeted small-to-medium sized businesses, they have already been serving a number of enterprise customers. The new enterprise solution is designed to meet the demands of those customers.

According to Garcia, SaaS apps are a great alternative for SMBs looking to save money during the current economic downturn.

“Our enterprise customers demand deep functionality and a high-level of security and reliability along with integration into existing systems and applications, but companies today don’t want to pay for or maintain expensive hardware or software — everyone is looking for ways to reduce waste,” he said in a press release. “Our sole focus is to bring business users the best technology available on the market with the least amount of resistance — SaaS is great for the bottom-line of a growing company as well as for a larger company that’s searching for cost-saving solutions.”

Central Desktop’s enterprise package comes with improved security, Salesforce.com integration, unlimited API access, and an SLA that guarantees 99.8% uptime. But the centerpiece of the new package is the Workflow manager. The Workflow function allows customers to create automated email notifications and tasks based on events at the file and database level in Central Desktop.

For example, one could set up the software to automatically notify a specific employee or department when a task is completed, create a new task based on the outcome. So a project manager could set up Central Desktop to automatically create a task for the IT guys to push live changes on the web site once approval has been by the editorial department.

The Workflow manager permeates the entire suite of tools and can be based at the database of file level.

The new enterprise version of the software starts at $499/month.

Since launching in 2005 on a sub-domain of its politics-themed older brother Techmeme has become a daily (hourly?) must read site in the technology blogosphere, in the same way that Memeorandum has become a must read site in the political blogosphere. Techmeme and its related sites, which are operated by a bootstrapped, two-person company called Epivoz, are so popular among bloggers and news junkies because they just do a better job surfacing the day’s top news stories, and more quickly, than better funded rivals like Google News and Topix.

Since Memeorandum launched in 2004 and Techmeme in 2005 (originally as a sub domain of Memdorandum), Epivoz has launched two other sites on the same back end: WeSmirch for celebrity gossip in March of 2006, and BallBug for baseball news a few weeks later.

“What’s the next vertical site for Memeorandum? [Founder Gabe Rivera] won’t say exactly, but from what I’ve seen, he’s a discussion follower. If blogs are talking about something and linking back and forth a lot, expect Memeorandum to be there eventually,” wondered Mike Arrington when BallBug was launched. However, in the intervening two and a half years, the Techmeme empire has remained exactly the same size.

A job post spotted over the weekend, however, points to where Techmeme might expand in the future. Epivoz is looking to hire employee number three, and one of the required skills that they’re looking for, is familiarity with the following topics: “technology, business, finance, economics, politics, biotech, clean tech, the environment, football, or automobiles.”

Technology and politics are already covered by Epivoz’s two most popular sites (Techmeme and Memeorandum, repsectively), but business, finance, economics (all currently popular and related issues), biotech, cleantech, the environment, football, and automobiles suggest potential new verticals for the company. Could Techmeme be readying the launch of new companion news watching sites? It sure sounds that way.

Given the current state of the world economy, finance and economics news has become topic number one for many consumers, so that would make a lot of sense as a area of expansion for the site. Cleantech and the environment make sense as well, since the price of oil has created a lot of mainstream interest in those topics. Football and cars, meanwhile, are heavily blogged about topical areas that would fit well into Epivoz’s link-based algorithmic news gathering framework.