Congratulations to Howard Lindzon and his StockTwits Network, which just made an announcement that it has raised an additional $3 million in a Series B round. I have known Howard for almost as long as I have involved with social media. When I used to run a web widgets blog called “Flying Seeds” Howard contacted me about writing for his start-up called The Blogging Times. Howard and I would trade emails about web widgets and golf, two of our passions. Howard introduced me to Fred Wilson back before it seemed that every other person on the web knew of him.

I still remember back in 2007 when Fred and Howard started talking about “this Twitter thing” and Howard going on and on about how Twitter was going to revolutionize the way average investors got their information. Basically, Howard had the foresight to understand that Twitter and all the other real-time news streams would eventually disintermediate the mainstream media, brokerage houses, research newsletters,etc. with the individual investor. What’s even more impressive to me was that both Howard and Fred actually put their money where their mouthes were and ponied up some capital to get StockTwits launched. Fred even invested in Twitter, itself.

So I say, “Bravo Howard…. great job and build it even bigger!!!”

When I read about this announcement today I was, of course, inside of my Google Reader with a cup of coffee, reading the headlines from a hundred or so RSS feeds to which I subscribe. Google Reader has changed the way I consume information. Without Google Reader it simply would be physically impossible for me, or anyone, to manually visit a couple hundred websites during an hour on a Sunday morning much less visit them in a week (even with 100 cups of coffee).

Google Reader, to those who don’t yet know, is a web based program that looks much like any email program (think Outlook, Hotmail, or Gmail) and it automatically goes out to those same couple hundred websites, knocks on their door, and asks if they have any new articles, blog posts, photos, etc. If so, Google Reader will grab the content and download it to my very own Google Reader account. The screen is set-up with individual feeds and folders in a left-hand column and the headlines in the main window.

All I have to do is log-in and start scanning the headlines by clicking the J key on my keyboard. Everytime I scan an item it is marked as read and disappears. It’s quite satisfying to scan through dozens of items and watch the unread count drop.

On a typical morning, I might have 150 to 200 new headlines waiting for me in Google Reader. However, even though there’s literally hundreds of pages of content available, I will actually only fully read 5 to 10 articles that look interesting. Think of it as a digital version of scanning through the pages of a newspaper. When I started reading RSS feeds I used a program called Bloglines and very few mainstream media companies offered RSS feeds of their content. Therefore, the content delivered to my laptop at that time came primarily from personal blogs and the blog posts, themselves, had a fairly “long” shelf-life of of a couple days to even a week. Therefore, if you skipped a day or two of reading RSS feeds you could always come back a couple days later and read the items without fear that the world had changed so much as to make the content irrelevant.

However, recently the situation with content has changed dramatically but, unfortunately, Google Reader has not been able to keep up with the changes. The situation has become so pronounced that Robert Scoble even declared that he has doesn’t even need Google Reader to stay abreast of real-time news. Here’s his actual post “Why I Don’t Use Google Reader Anymore.”

While Scoble is not wrong, he’s actually only half right. What’s happened is that hundreds of mainstream media companies now offer RSS feeds for their content and this new content is VERY time sensitive. In some instances, the shelf-life of this MSM content is only a couple hours. Additionally, the volume of content being published in many of the larger media companies is overwhelming.

Heck, even Guy Kawasaki and Andrew Sullivan are “unfollowable” inside of Google Reader. These two web “heavies” make me feel guilty when I subscribe to their RSS feeds because the unread number will easily rise into the hundreds after only a day or two if I am not totally focused on banging away on the “J-key” (the method for scrolling through feeds in Google Reader). But if I’m not following Guy or Andrew I feel that I may be missing something (more so Andrew than Guy, who has recently been hoping to trade some of his personal brand equity for revenues from Google Adsense).

I find myself subscribing to RSS feeds from websites like Gawker or ESPN only to go back in a day of two and delete them. It’s not that I don’t want the content from these sources but, rather, Google Reader is not configured to handle such content. So, Scoble is correct in the sense that Twitter is now a better platform with which we can consume large volumes of time sensitive news.

But Google Reader could, and should, make some relatively basic changes to how feeds are configured. Currently, an individual RSS feed in Google Reader can only be set to “New Items” or “All Items.” This is now insufficient for high volume time sensitive streams. Google should enable users to set a feed or folder to “Streaming Items” and choose how many items display. The quantity of items in a stream could be set by time (1 hour, 1 day, or 1 week) and it could be set by quantity (10, 25, 50 , 100 items).

Think of this new configuration as a fixed window on a stream of items. The items continually come in to the window, get bumped down the list as newer items arrive, and then exit the window one they’ve been pushed all the way down. This is much the way Twitter works today. The key difference in such a Streaming Items set-up would be that there would NOT be an archive of items, which have already been pushed out of the stream window. Thus, there would also not be an unread count number for RSS feeds configured in this new way.

Such a change would mean that users of Google Reader could create a folder of high-volume time-sensitive RSS feeds and not worry about the unread number going up higher and higher. This new type of filter would make it possible for folks like Scoble use Google Reader in much the same way as they do Twitter or did Friendfeed. You could simply open up a Streaming Folder and scan the headlines. “Take a sip from the firehose.”

I would love to create a folder, for example, with RSS feeds from websites covering Russian news. I would be able to put the top 10 Russian news sources (Kommersant, Yuga.ru, en.rian.ru, etc.) and whenever I wanted to browse through the current news I could open the folder and scan through the headlines. If I set the filter to only show items from the last hour, then this would, in essence, become like my Twitter list (Russian-News). However, I would argue, and I think Scoble would agree, that such a real-time stream would be quite valuable.

Lastly, as Pubsubhubbub becomes even more widely adopted this type of configuration will become more important. Google Reader is at an important inflection point in its development and if it doesn’t find a way to stay relevant as the real-time web starts to become more dominant, it’s risks losing it position as the favorite for hard-core information junkies. Let’s hope they are listening.

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