Social memetracker ReadBurner is releasing a range of new features today that delivers Digg style functionality, but without the direct voting.
New section “Climbing” provides a Digg style popular list with stories that reach a certain threshold hitting the top of the page, and then is updated as another, and another story comes along.
“Top” provides a memetracker style service that tracks the most popular stories in the past 24 hours, based on shares across Google Reader and Netvibes, and the new “New” section listing the newest stories to hit the system. The last new release is a “Breaking News” feature that is focused on highlighting new stories that are getting a lot of attention in a short space of time. When a story has high velocity (a lot of shares in a short period of time) ReadBurner will display a big breaking news graphic (CNN-style) that shows up on every page of the site and links people to the story. In (perhaps fighting) words the ReadBurner team claim that in testing their breaking news feature was listing big stories hours before they hit TechMeme.
For those who haven’t visited the site ReadBurner is a smart service that is leading the way in providing meme tracking using data from next wave 2.0 sites as opposed to blogs alone. Since being acquired by Adam Ostrow and Drew Olanoff in March the site has been overhauled and also incorporates inline support for Google Reader.
Note the new features may be live on the site at the time this post goes live, but if they aren’t they won’t be far away