Perhaps you know and use Feedly, a sort of alternative interface for Google reader, which displays your feeds in a cool way that looks a little like a newspaper. But to use Feedly you have a Gogle Reader account and fill it with interesting feeds. Feedly does a good job in showing you the most interesting things from those feeds, but it still costs quite some time and effort to shape your collection of news sources. Of course this also adds to the customizability and that’s why I use Feedly almost every day. If you like reading news online I suggest you check it out.

If you already have a twitter account with a group of friends you have hand picked, then you probably also enjoy reading the links they’ve sent. Now Twittertim.es works really easily in managing and displaying the links from your friends. It’s a really cool way to see what is hot with your twitter friends right now. The only thing you have to do is log in with your twitter account and Twittertim.es goes crunching. Interestingly this takes about an hour, but then they have made a personal page for you. What you see is a page with stories which are linked to by your friends, or your friends’ friends. Where Feedly uses Google Reader shared item counts to rank news, Twittertim.es uses the number of times your friends posted something on their twitter accounts.

Another cool features is that you can view someone else’s page. Mine can be found on twittertim.es/tobiasverhoog. So you will not see a page with links by me there, but links from my twitter friends. Go to their homepage to also see a couple of example pages from some better known internet journalists such as Tim O’Reilly or Jeff Jarvis. You can also watch a video tour there.

Finally, pages by Media Sources and pages based on Twitter Lists are nice ways to explore more news sources. View a page of Wired or The New York Times or one based on links of the twitter list “Tech News People” curated by Robert Scoble. You don’t need to first make you own page to view these pages.

It’s clear that it’s very interesting to view news based on what your friends are reading and sharing on their twitter accounts. It’s funny that in the screenshot I just took for this article the piece on the new version of Digg is on top, because I think this is what news aggregators such as Digg and also Feedly need. Recommended news from your friends, added up by popularity and displayed in a convenient and clear way.