iStalkr Go Go 2.0 Gadget

I got clued to a pretty cool gadget called iStalkr last night, so this morning I thought our readers should have the look at this new startup. The site is a feed aggregator in Beta testing that is supposed to stalk others obviously. I don't want to be too hard on the "spanking" new tool but it is pretty stark at the moment even by the developer's standards.

iStalkr is intended to be a livestream RSS and ATOM feed tracking device that creates a time line of activities for users and their services. The site resembles twitter in its ability to allow users to exchange and monitor time lines. Like twitter, this could help people synchronize their schedules and share their Web habits for a more social utilization of the Web. iStalkr is much more professional looking than twitter, but is just not there in the development aspect yet.  

The site design is very clean and attractive and the ability to add feeds is obviously there.  This site does have potential as all Beta launches do because of the possibility for user feedback modification. Personally, I am thinking there should be a much more graphic and UI friendly version of this type system available by now. A user's ability to monitor friends is interesting, but in this case not much more effective than del.icio.us.

I added a feed to iStalkr very quickly and the site really does a nice job of displaying the feed results in time sync. I do not particularly like having to go hunt my feeds and come back to iStalkr to manually add them. Perhaps there is as hidden generic feed browser button somewhere I did not notice?

Users should also not expect iStalkr to accept all your feeds because it ate 3 consecutive manual additions I made, but there are several notices about similar issues from admin. If there is one thing I advise startup friends NOT to do it is offer their services before the most fundamental UI tools are readily available.  

iStalkr is not intended to be a feed aggregator, though it has that capability. The site is really geared to allow users to aggregate their own content and to accumulate content from their friends.

If I were to use iStalkr, I would want to customize it to be my reader and a communication/tracking tool to see where my friends are and to share what they want to share. The "where they are" aspect is not noticeably available at this time and many small glitches are around to hamper any user's initial iStalkr visit.