The nice folks at Feedburner have added a new capability called Feedflare, which basically allows you to instrument your RSS with all sorts of feedback widgets that front for various web services:

[from Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: No Feed is an Island: Introducing FeedFlare]

FeedFlare is initially launching today with seven simple options, including:

* most popular tags for this item via del.icio.us
* tag this item at del.icio.us
* Technorati cosmos: number of links to this post
* Creative Commons license for this specific item. This works even if you are splicing, say, a Flickr photo feed into a blog feed and the two parent feeds have different licenses associated with them.
* number of comments on this post (currently only for feeds created by Wordpress)
* email this item
* email the author of this item (particularly helpful if the item ends up spliced into another feed or repurposed on a site).

Shortly after this launch, we'll also integrate a "more like this" option from Sphere which will link to a list of related posts at Sphere.

So I have turned on just about everything available in the Get Real feed. (While I was there I noticed that Get Real has climbed above 1000 RSS subscribers!)

Pretty cool. Rejiggering the paradigm of RSS as a feedback system -- thanks to interlacing these widgets into the mix -- holds some interesting issues. Just like advertising in the RSS stream, the blogger immediately asks "can I use the same widgets on my blog, and have a single mechanism to manage these sorts of interaction?" As soon as Feedburner offered Feedblitz -- the email notification service -- integrated with their feed management, I immediately dropped using the MT embedded solution for email notification. So, I can extrapolate: as soon as Feedburner stabilizes the implementation of FeedFlare, I would likely want to use the same stuff on my blog, so that the user experience -- wherever -- is as similar and rich as possible.

Played out to a logical conclusion, Feedburner and its competitors might be taking a new role as the medium through which not only is RSS streaming out to the readers, but all manner of social gestures -- clicks, views, tags, ratings, rankings, comments, tags, and links -- might be streaming back. And not just streaming back to be statically analyzed, but to be displayed and reincorporated into the user experience: rewiring the social architecture.

It looks like a small feature, but it's secretly huge.

[pointer from Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, who thinks the big deal here is opening up the solution so that any company can be offering a competitive solution to Del.icio.us. Yes, I likt that too, but the "feedback through the feed" -- capturing social responses that have been entered on the other end of an RSS pipe -- is going to be bigger, still.]