thredr.com (beta) gives you a quick glance at the top stories being discussed and viewed for various topics. We're still building out the service, so there may be some rough edges and updates may occur at irregular times.

I started this service, along with Bob Blakeley, because I was being overwhelmed with RSS feeds. I wanted a way to get a quick look at what people were talking about for a handful of topics without having to manually scan through all the feeds. In my particular case I wanted a better way to track news and conversations about Tablet PCs and UMPCs. Although TechMeme is one of the best sources--if not the best for tracking technology news, I wanted something that worked with smaller topics--topics that are too small or tangential to appear on it. A couple friends also had similar interests in tracking news about Apple-related products, digital photography and finance, so we decided to build a platform that could collect up the micro-conversations going on for various topcis. We're growing the list of topics organically so we may add some more in the coming days as well as open up the platform to you so you can create your own conversation threads. No ETA for these services as of yet.

If you have any ideas for topics or feeds, you can email me directly at lorenheiny at hotmail dot com or visit my blog at http://www.lorenheiny.com.