The reader in question is called as ShareFire and is an adobe air based feed reader.

Home Page

http://www.sharefirereader.com/

Description

ShareFire is a feature-rich news aggregator that lets you share stories via AIM, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, email and more with no copying and pasting, or dragging and dropping.

Features

• Share stories right from ShareFire. Built-in support for AIM, Twitter, and email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or your default email client).
• Post articles to Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Newsvine, MySpace, Google Bookmarks, and Windows Live Favorites.
• Create Smart Topics with keywords you’re interested in. Only posts containing those keywords will show up in your Smart Topics.
• See Notifications when ShareFire finds new posts. You can also turn on notifications just for specific Smart Topics.
• Language support for English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Dutch, Czech, Turkish, Polish, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
• View an article’s summary, or switch over to Site View to see the entire webpage in the integrated browser.
• Organize your feeds any way you want using folders.
• Automatic categorization by topic and author.
• Automatic feed resolution. Rather than tracking down and entering a feed URL, just put in the site’s normal URL and ShareFire will automatically find and aggregate its feed.
• Realtime search across all feeds.
• OPML import and export.
• Vi keys! (And some Emacs ones, too.)
• Completely cross-platform, thanks to Adobe AIR. (Linux support still in alpha.)

Installation

Let’s see how to install ShareFire on Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope)

1. Go to the home page of ShareFire

2. Click on the button that says Install

3. You’ll be prompted with the installation window. Follow the steps to install ShareFire.

Running ShareFire

Once you have installed ShareFire successfully, it’ll show up in Applications > Accessories > ShareFire.

The main window looks like this

Following is how the feeds appear in ShareFire

Following is how a post in ShareFire looks like

You can import OPML feeds by clicking the settings button

You can also configure your email to share stories right from with in ShareFire

However, my favourite feature is tweeting from within ShareFire.

I think ShareFire will soon become my default feed reader if I don’t face too many problems!

Home Page

http://www.pidgin.im/

Description

Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once.

Supported chat networks:

• AIM
• Bonjour
• Gadu-Gadu
• Google Talk
• Groupwise
• ICQ
• IRC
• MSN
• MySpaceIM
• QQ
• SILC
• SIMPLE
• Sametime
• XMPP
• Yahoo!
• Zephyr

Installing facebook plugin

1. Go to the following link to download the facebook plugin for Pidgin.

http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

2. Download the deb file. Click here to download it directly.

3. Double click the downloaded deb file (pidgin-facebookchat-1.53.deb) to install the facebook plugin for pidgin.

Setting up Facebook chat in Pidgin

1. After starting pidgin click Accounts > Manage Accounts.

2. Click Add to bring up the Add Account window.

3. From the protocol dropdown select facebook.

4. Enter your facebook credentials and your facebook chat account is now configured with pidgin.

5. Following is how the facebook contacts will appear on pidgin.

Now chat with your facebook contacts without having to login to facebook.