RSS Readers Roundup
Posted by admin | Filed under Apps
For anyone not accustomed to RSS yet, it means “Really Simple Syndication”. It’s basically a way for websites to tell the world that they have added new content. Both users and other websites can view the summary of fresh content, and with a feed reader you skip most of the ads… for now.
In my quest to stay informed I’ve tried many a feedreader, but I’ll say right now that Bloglines is working the best for me. The main reason for this choice is that it’s entirely web-based but still has many features of desktop clients. With my desktop pc at home “undergoing maintenance,” I’m forced to live online until I have a hard drive to save everything to again.
Another bonus of an online app: you can always access it. I can be at work or a friend’s place and bring up anything I’ve seen in my feeds. There is broadband almost everywhere I go, so I can even get to the mobile version through my ppc.
Now to cover some of the free rss desktop clients I’ve tried:
I was using Flock’s rss reader until I was forced off of my computer, and it works pretty well. I’m still using Flock for reasons I’ll save for another post, but it was cool having the reader built into the browser I already had open. It’s easy enough to learn that anyone can figure it out, and well integrated with the browser. If a site has an rss feed, it shows up as an icon in the address bar where you can subscribe to it. I also like the ability to see folders down the side and how many new items are in each… something Google Reader is lacking. I do wish the front page would show more than 1 entry per folder however, maybe the newest entry from each feed.
Before Flock I was using Feed Reader, which has recently been upgraded and given a really nice look. It’s a fairly small program with all the standard features and more. Sometimes the pop-up alerts next to the tray are good and other times annoying, but you can customize those. One rare feature in Feed Reader is Smart Feeds, where you can specify criteria much like a search folder in Outlook. The views are also very configurable as shown on the screenshots page.
Next we have my breif stint with Google Desktop’s Web Clips in the sidebar. Depending on your level of interest with RSS, this may be enough for you. While google is scanning through your browsing history it adds rss feeds for websites you visit. This is great for people who don’t want to go through the hassle of finding the rss feed url and adding it and so on. There aren’t any folders to organize feeds, and the posts are displayed as text-only, but its a good light-weight reader.
Google Reader is another web-based application for reading RSS feeds. It has its merrits, but I’d rather use a scroll wheel to go through 20 new posts instead of clicking over and over. Especially if you finish reading a long post that made you scroll the page – then you have to go back up to click on the next post, etc. They probably have keyboard shortcuts by now but I prefer the mouse most of the time. It probably sounds pretty bad, but the rest of the features are pretty strong, such as labeling feeds, starring items, viewing feeds on a cell phone…
I’ll briefly mention a lot of the portal pages are starting to support rss feeds too. I expect this is the most common way for users to access rss as they gravitate to whatever the big companies make them use. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and more are providing users with ways to customize their page and make it worth setting as a homepage.
Another freeware program i briefly tried was Klipfolio, which lives on your desktop and more closely resembles a desktop widget. Personally I prefer a full-fledged reader as opposed to a panel of numbers, but again this might better suit your news needs – it is awful purdy.
This is only the tip of the iceberg summarizing some of the readers, but as you can see there is something for every taste.
Readers:
- Bloglines
- Flock
- Feed Reader
- Google Desktop
- Google Reader
- Personalized homepages from Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.
- Klipfolio
Tags: Freeware, Software, Web Apps 2.0
One Response to “RSS Readers Roundup”
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James Holderness Says:
October 13th, 2006 at 3:35 amGive Snarfer a try as a desktop client. It does a reasonable job of synchronizing with Bloglines so you can flip between the two depending on your mood or needs.
