Home Rich RSS Readers: best of breed picks

Rich RSS Readers: best of breed picks

This post was largely written by Ryan
Stewart
, a guest blogger on Read/WriteWeb. I’ve added my own Best of Breed picks for
each category.

Feed readers can be divided up
into two general camps: The web based feed readers – such as NewsAlloy, Rojo,
Bloglines and Google Reader – are mostly powered by Ajax and
provide a basic, if unspectacular, list of features. However if you want to read your
news outside a web browser, having your feeds stored within these web applications
becomes problematic. The other camp is the standalone feed readers which include FeedDemon, RSSBandit, and NewzCrawler. They provide a lot of power, but are tied
to a single computer. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a true Rich Internet Application
feed reader which would provide the best features from the two camps and bolster mainstream RSS usage.

Web Based Readers

The current generation of web based feed readers have done a great job of using the
web to make reading feeds a more social experience. Many of the web-based RSS
readers allow users to rate a particular news post or tag a post so that it is more
meaningful to other users. As a result, users of online feed readers can benefit from
their peers and have a sense of the most relevant items. Rojo takes this a step further
by allowing you to have “friends” that you can share posts between. However at the same
time, when a user comes to rely on their favorite web based solution, they give up some
control over their content. Services like Google’s Reader are almost always available,
but the smaller companies can have issues with downtime during maintenance or periodic
disruptions.

Richard’s Best of Breed picks:
Rojo is my current favourite, although I still have issues
with its relative lack of speed. Bloglines is a
good solid choice, but lacks the advanced social functionality that Ryan alluded to. A Techcrunch
review
late March by Frank Gruber rated Google Reader and FeedLounge highly for
performance.

Desktop Based Readers

The desktop solutions have a different problem. They offer powerful feature
sets
such as synchronization (allowing you to download your news to read later).
However most can’t provide the social aspect of the web based readers. They provide the
users with a familiar user experience, which will be key to widespread adoption of RSS,
but they can’t provide the closeness to the web that the web based readers can.
The desktop readers handle enclosures very well, which as RSS matures will become a very
important feature. The ability to play music or watch video directly from the RSS feed is
something that right now is possible with the desktop readers but has rudimentary
implementation by the web based readers. The desktop readers all provide a solid tool set
with an experience that most users expect and are familiar with.

Richard’s Best of Breed picks:
Newsgator leads the pack in my opinion, mainly
because of its synchronization functionality. Newsgator has a second-to-none suite of RSS
Reader products, covering all the major desktop platforms – Newsgator (Outlook plugin),
FeedDemon for Windows, NetNewsWire for Mac, plus its other specific solutions. I can also
recommend BlogBridge, a free and open source
desktop reader. I’ve been testing Blogbridge over the past couple of months and found the
smart feeds (basically custom searches) to be especially useful.

The Rich Internet Application Reader

Ideally, a news reader built as an RIA (rich internet app)
would take the best things from the Web and desktop – and provide all of the benefits.
It’s important to realize how valuable a quality user experience is to the
average person. The ability to give that user experience in a package that also
leverages the power of the web, is what sets RIAs apart. An RIA news reader
provides the power of the desktop reader, but without the install. It can also
incorporate the exciting social aspects of the web based readers. Because RIAs can be
deployed on a variety of platforms, the user has absolute control over their content.
They can read the news on their PDA, on their laptop, or on their cell phone. The ability
to download content for use offline would be a big part of the RIA – and while online,
the user could take advantage of tagging and seeing what their network of friends is
reading. Nothing stands in the way of desktop applications implementing these kinds of
features, but with an RIA the user isn’t tied to one computer. The goal is to give
the user access to their data at all times, regardless of how they want to consume it,
and then get out of the way. Therein lies the elegance of the RIA solution.

Richard’s Best of Breed picks:

As Ryan noted, there
doesn’t appear to be a market-leading RIA RSS Reader at this point. In many ways
Ajax-heavy web-based RSS Readers would fit into this category – so I’d nominate the likes
of Google Reader and FeedLounge, as well as apps like Goowy that use Flash. But like Ryan, I don’t have an
overall top pick in this category – perhaps people can make suggestions in the
comments?

Ryan’s Conclusion

The ability to deliver desktop level functionality is something the web has been
attempting for a long time, and we’re getting closer every day. News readers are becoming
more and more indispensable as people turn to blogs for their news – and even major news
sites are making increasing use of RSS feeds. Being able to take that content wherever
you go – online or offline, is going to become very important. The explosion of mobile
devices and the coming of the living room entertainment system are going to provide new
ways for users to consume RSS. The solutions that are going to get the most attention are
those that can deploy on any of these platforms and also provide the ‘2.0’ functionality
that has changed the web.

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