Yesterday Rackspace launched a cloud app partner portal called Cloud Tools. That’s a really boring way of saying that our partners rock and that we’re trying to help them build their businesses.

Why do that? Because by showing off the cloud tools ecosystem we help developers build their businesses (we are featuring 15 partners at launch). That makes them happy. Happy developers build more stuff, which needs more hosting, and they also tell their friends about how Rackspace is helpful to them.

Lots of people ask me why Rackspace is doing building43 and paying me to fly around the world to interview tech and business innovators. It’s to be helpful to developers and companies building business. I interview everyone, not just Rackspace customers. By helping them build their business, we make them happy. Happy developers build more stuff, which needs more hosting, and they also tell their friends about how Rackspace is helpful to them. Oh, I’m repeating myself.

How can we help you?

Marshall Kirkpatrick takes on the “RSS is dead” meme, started by Steve Gillmor, but really started by all those people who haven’t been using RSS much anymore.

My answer to Marshall: I’m not in the news business anymore, but if I were I’d keep Twitter up on screen. I’ve been looking closely at Google Reader’s latest features, Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and I gotta say that most of what shows up on TechMeme shows up in my Twitter feed up to a day earlier.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been doing a little experiment: can I outrace TechMeme and TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb and all the others? The answer is a resounding YES. But it requires following a very select group of people on Twitter. Believe it or not, the same group puts most of their items into FriendFeed and Facebook, too. It’s very rare that I see news in Facebook or FriendFeed that I don’t see in Twitter first. It’s even rarer that I see news in Google Reader. Why?

RSS isn’t real time. Deal with it. Yes, it’s moving more and more real time, but I guarantee you that this post will be in FriendFeed and Twitter before it hits Google Reader. Why? I put it there manually the second I hit post. I’ve noticed that most of the top content producers (you call them writers or bloggers) do the same thing.

Anyway, want to see how this works? I’m watching 2,391 people and brands on Twitter. That’s FAR MORE than I could read on Google Reader, by the way. Headlines in Google Reader just aren’t satisfying and reading full text slows you down so you must be far choosier on who you listen to.

That means I see new Tweets every few seconds. Easy to keep up with, if you are dedicated.

What do I do with them? I click “favorite” on my favorite Tweets. In just about two weeks I have built up a database of about 1,700 favorites. It’s good stuff, but it’s mostly useless unless you only want to see the last 300.

What’s missing from my favorites? Noise. I’ve filtered it out. But to do that I’ve probably had to read about 100,000 Tweets. Maybe more. And THAT is the disadvantage of Twitter and why Louis Gray does have a point when he says he still loves Google Reader.

The thing is none of the four of us are normal. We are ALL news junkies. I love knowing what’s going on in people’s lives and what they are passionate about in the tech industry and I want to hear it directly from them. I can’t get that by just reading a newspaper. I can’t get that from TechMeme, just look at my favorite tweets. How many of them go to TechMeme or Digg? Not many.

I’ve also started playing with a couple of new feed reading tools. One is Feedly. It only works on Firefox, unfortunately, but it sits on top of Google Reader and is very nice. Still, I like Twitter better for some reason. Yesterday LazyFeed came out, I’m working on a video with the founder that will be up in the morning, but it does the RSS hard work for me (it goes and finds feeds on topics I’m interested in so I don’t need to know anything about RSS). The thing is it isn’t nearly as interesting as Twitter. Why? I have no idea who wrote all the stuff that’s coming in there. For normal people Facebook is far better than all of these ways of learning the news.

I personally am bored with the whole topic. I don’t need more feeds. I don’t need better readers.

What do I need?

Better filters. That’s why I got so excited by FriendFeed. It’s why I’m playing around with human curation and all that (which proves again that Facebook is going to win this game).

Anyway, to me RSS is no longer interesting to talk about. The battlefield has moved on. RSS will be used by lots of people for a long time, but, honestly, when I give talks to people I show them FriendFeed, Facebook, and Twitter and all the tools that play in those. I don’t usually open up Google Reader anymore. Why? It’s moved into the boring camp for early adopter audiences and it’s still too weird for late adopter audiences who are hearing more about Twitter and Facebook.

What about you? Is RSS interesting or boring to you? Why?

Augmented Reality apps are about to become the HUGE rage on the iPhone. Why?

They demo well.

What are they? These are new apps that use the iPhone 3GS’s camera, compass, accelerometer to overlay data on real life. You point your iPhone down the street in New York, for instance, and it shows you where the closest subway stop is.

The problem is, this will make you look like a total dork.

I’m cool with that!

Why talk about these apps today? The first one shipped today. Here’s some good articles about the trend.

Layar3, and others, discussed on Wired.com.

The augmented reality blog is covering the trend.

ReadWriteWeb writes about the first augmented reality app shipping yesterday.

Mashable on top 6 augmented reality apps.

TechCrunch on Layar.

So, what can we do about the usability and the dorky factor? Well, NRU shows off an augmented reality app that works well as both a regular iPhone app that you can hold flat, as well as one that you hold up in front of you.

Cool deal. I can’t wait to look like a dork, though. Shoot me.