I'm always looking for ways to get things done a bit faster, and today we bring you what could very well be the ultimate sidebar. It's actually more like a personalized homepage, a sidebar, and an application launcher all rolled up into one. That sounds pretty interesting, doesn't it?

One thing that the Firefox developers have stayed clear of thus far is implementing a full RSS feed reader into the browser. Firefox does have a built in system called Live Bookmarks that are supposed to compensate for needing a feed reader in the browser, but as many of you know it falls short.

The Flock team has been working hard as they push towards their first release of the social web browser, which is based on Firefox 2. To get the ball rolling they kicked Flock 1.0 Beta out the door today so that user feedback can start rolling in.

I don't know about you but there is a whole world of news out there that I don't read, and it's partly because of the language barrier. Services like Google Translate and BabelFish have tried to break down that barrier one step at a time, and while they do offer sitewide translations there is still no good alternative to translate RSS feeds.

When Flock 0.9 launched it was a pretty big overhaul, and now their next big milestone is Flock 1.0 which currently has a vague release date of Fall 2007. Honestly this is the dream browser for any heavy social network user out there, and hopefully they'll pursue more of the less tech savvy people who use MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube because I can guarantee that they would absolutely love it.

I've come across a lot of great feed readers before, but I don't believe any of them match up to a new one that I was introduced to by Pieter in the CyberNet Forum. It's called Newzie (Windows-only), and it has a strong focus on making feed reading as easy as possible.

I’ve been a huge fan of the online Google Reader ever since they launched the much needed redesign almost a year ago. Since then I think they’ve taken feed reading to a whole new level, and have drawn many users away from Bloglines.

Google Reader users will be happy to know that there is now a desktop notifier for Windows so that you’ll know when there are new items to read. It’s not officially made by Google, but it works well nonetheless. Disappointingly this notifier can only show how many unread items there are, and doesn’t show what feeds were updated.

The IE-based Maxthon browser released a much anticipated version 2 today. This comes just 3-months after Google invested an astounding $1 million into the browser, and that raised a lot of eyebrows because of the close relationship Google has with Firefox.

RSS Bandit is probably one of the most well-known desktop feed readers available, and it just got a nice overhaul. The new RSS Bandit 1.5 has all sorts of cool new stuff, but the thing I found most interesting with it is the comment watching feature.