As Alan notes, we just rolled out another round of Mergelab updates;  here are the main things we fixed and improved for this release.

1. We made it easier to add people to your news feed:

• You can now import people from Yahoo and Hotmail as well as Gmail. 
• You can also add a person manually– if you paste in an email signature or other freeform text, the site will automatically extract email addresses and web links for that person.  These will be used to discover news items about that person.
• You can subscribe to news about a person from a shared feed.

2. We added an RSS feed of Mergelab updates. Now you can view news about your friends on your portal of choice.