Tracking topics on the Web can be a painful process, due to the amount of noise and difficulty of filtering it. So to help you out, we've selected and categorized the leading topic-tracking tools. This is based on the discussion that arose from our earlier post about topic feeds, which are RSS feeds for keywords or phrases.

During the process of analyzing these topic tracking tools, we discovered - to our surprise - that not many of these services output results as RSS. Some of the leading apps in this field require users to visit their service. With that in mind, here is our full list and analysis.

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Feed and/or Email Services
These are services that output RSS and/or other formats, such as email notification. We think this type of topic feed tool is the most flexible, particularly when it outputs RSS. With RSS feed output, you can do further filtering or grouping of the feeds inside an RSS reader like Google Reader or Netvibes.

The most common such tool is probably Google Alerts. However we were impressed with Topikality and PubSub, which both output RSS. Swamii and Woofeed don't output RSS (we wish they would), but at least they offer email notifications.

Google Alerts
PubSub
Yahoo Pipes
Topikality
Swamii (just email, no RSS)
Woofeed (just email or mobile, no RSS)

Destination Services
These services don't output RSS or emails for topic searches. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just means you have to visit the destination site to see results every day. I've been impressed recently with the user interface and features of LazyFeed, Regator and My6Sense - they're all worth checking out.

LazyFeed
Regator
My6Sense
Technorati
Ensembli (offers email digests)
Guzzle.it
Cascaad

Social Filter
These services show what is popular or new amongst their respective communities. There are many other such services, so the following is just a sample:

Twitter search (e.g. for hashtags)
Delicious feeds

Community Curated
Similar to social filter services, only these have a specific community driving the output of stories. Again, the below is a small sample:

Digg
Reddit
Hacker News
Slashdot

People Curated
Topic-focused blogs (such as ReadWriteWeb!) are great for tracking topics on the Web. In recent times, light blogging services have offered an easy way for individuals or small groups of people to curate information on a given topic.

Tumblr
Posterous
Favit

Aggregators / Portals
These services aggregate, or group, news and other stories around a specific topic.

Tweetmeme
Eqentia
Alltop
Google Fast-Flip feeds

Misc
We couldn't easily classify these ones, but maybe you can in the comments!

Google Trends
MashLogic

We hope this post is a starter for you to explore topic feeds. Let us know what apps we missed in the comments, as well as your thoughts on our categorization.

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Could a more eye-catching approach to syndication make RSS more accesible to mainstream users outside the geekosphere? Two new websites have just launched that rely on such a strategy gaining traction.

Spectives and Readfresh are the sites in question, and both offer thumbnail images and a limited amount of text. Readfresh monitors sites and brings the most recently updated sites to the top of a user's page, allowing users to see what's new at a glance. Spectives, on the other hand, gives users "one page, a lot of pictures, updating constantly" from RSS feeds and websites. Read on for a side-by-side comparison and our assessment.

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These sites did remind us a bit of Guzzle.it or Lazyfeed. The major difference, however, is that users are content curators rather than being served pre-packaged feeds based on topics and keywords, which is something we'd wanted in the first place.

In other words, if you already know what sites you want to read, but Google Reader makes you cross-eyed and/or frustrated, either one of these sites might be great for you to try.

Spectives

One thing we love about Spectives is that it takes the tech out of subscribing to RSS feeds. Users can add a feed or type in a web address and click a link for the feed or feeds for that page. The content then appears in a user's "collection" of feeds with no futher fuss.

Content consists of a post title as well as a thumbnail of an image pulled from the post.

Here's a quick, one-minute demo video:

And here's what our collection looks like:

Collections are shareable and linkable, and Spectives offers their own curated collections for popular verticals such as humor and gadgets.

But be warned: Only sites and feeds where Spectives can find images will be added to a user's collection. So it might not work for some types of feeds. And with this stipulation comes a couple bugs.

We were beyond disappointed and slightly confused that the site couldn't find images on Penny Arcade and for some reason, the site bugged out once when we tried to add Questionable Content to our collection and once again when we tried Awkward Family Photos.

Readfresh

One thing we love about Readfresh is that it doesn't rely on RSS feeds to serve updated content at all. Users simply enter the URL of the websites they want to track, and content is served, with a thumbnail of each website gliding to the top of the stack when the site shows new content.

According to the developer, Emil Schutte, Readfresh "uses a combination of text and image analysis to decide when a site has changed. That's where most of the interesting work happens. It attempts to zoom in on new content in the thumbnail image when a site updates. The results right now are usually pretty good, but it depends on the site.

"It also has some smarts to discover changes as quickly as possible without flooding sites with pings all the time."

Indeed, Readfresh seemed to do really well at serving timely content. However, users will see one thumbnail per website as opposed to one thumbnail per post, and each thumb links to the site itself, not to an individual post.

Also, we can't figure out a way to share our Readfresh collections, which is a disappointment, indeed.

Who Wins in a Sudden Death Round?

As of now, each site offers unique benefits. We like Readfresh's implementation of non-visual content and sites without RSS feeds. We also like Spectives' post-by-post updates, which will surely make content easier to keep track of. Both offerings need work, as newly launched products, and Spectives seems particularly buggy.

So which site wins you over, readers? Let us know what you think about these two products and visual RSS in general in the comments.

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