As I alluded to in a previous post: Managing (and Reading) Your Feeds, I am on a personal mission to tame the continuous, but absolutely essential, inflow of information that I am facing on a daily basis. One of those inbound channels is my large (and growing) list of feeds that supply me with a continuous stream of information, insight and inspiration. Left unchecked for any period of time, my feeds can actually inhibit, not increase, my daily productivity and I am sure I am not the only person.

Previously I recommended ReadAir – which I still really like – for accessing your GReader feeds but my googling yielded another interesting, and relatively new, application to the mix.

ShareFire (formerly known as Apprise) is the brainchild of Adobe AIR development team members Christian Cantrell and Dan Koestler, and is a really slick news aggregator written for Adobe AIR. ShareFire has several useful features, but what really differentiates it is the ability to share news stories with friends over various social networks right from the application. It currently supports sharing via email, AIM, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, MySpace, and Newsvine. It’s not a perfect connector (which is what I had been originally looking for) to GReader – it does not sync up with it like ReadAir does – but you can easily import and export OPML files that you have generated from other feed-based utilities (like Google Reader). Take a look at the screencast below for a brief demo of what the app is capable of.

A few of the other features that I really like are the fact that it is completely cross-platform (Windows and Mac, Linux support is still in development), it includes a keyword-based notification system (which they call Smart Topics), it allows you to arrange posts by topic, switch views between RSS and live web, and supports over a dozen foreign languages!

As with most cool new applications (web or otherwise) it is still considered in “Beta” so there are some minor bugs. However, with that said, the application is Open Source and all of the source code for ShareFire as well as all the libraries it uses is available on Google Code. So if you do find something you’d like to add or improve upon and you are so inclined you can make a contribution to the source code.

Despite the fact that it didn’t solve my problems of effectively managing my Google Reader account like ReadAir does, it does do a lot of other things exceptionally well, not least of which is sharing. Based on my short-term use, I am really impressed with it and highly recommend checking it out, especially if you are looking for a more effective tool to manage your feeds without being connected through a browser.