Frank Gruber has written a great review over at TechCrunch Comparing 9 Online Feed Readers. He concludes – ‘If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features. None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.’
About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
I don’t know what about you, but i use firefox live bookmarks for finding news, over 50(0) blogs are in the reach of a button =)
A.H
I’ve noticed NewsGator Online is getting slower and slower getting feeds to me so this will be a good read.
Good review, thanks for the link.
Newsgator Online’s speed took a major hit when they rolled out the new site design last week. Previously, it was much faster. I’m sure they’re working on it.
But Newsgator is the only service that syncs with both FeedDemon and NetNewsWire so it’s my choice, no matter how cool some of the other sites may appear to be.
Darren –
Have you tried reblog? PHP / MySQL Sourceforge project (see reblog.org) with the right use of AJAX and runs on your server. I know you’ve indicated you’re not much of a techie, but the installation is straightforward (you just edit one file with your config details). I’ve been trying it out as my main RSS reader since reading an excellent post about it on Lifehacker and have been quite impressed.
The one thing that makes reblog better than the other online readers is you store and keep the data. You aren’t reliant on somebody else’s server being up or down (bloglines plumber, anyone?). You can control how often you want to check the feeds instead of hoping the online reader is being responsible and respectful to publishers. You can search past posts through your RSS feeds (those you’ve archived or marked as published). For those who read a lot of feeds, you can get a good workflow going where pounding through 500-1000+ posts a day is a swift and organized process.
In fact, I got to this very post through reblog this morning.
One thing I do *not* like about reblog is how it makes everything public that you have marked as ‘published’ — in my case I added a robots.txt file that tells the robots to stay out of that out directory. I’m thinking about going a step further and adding authentication as well to the output file. It’s not that I don’t mind sharing what posts I find interesting, it’s just that it shares too much of the post (the entire post) and that has splog connotations (something you’ve written about here at problogger before as being concerned about and which I agree wholeheartedly).
This comment might sound like an ad for reblog, but I have nothing to do with them. Just a happy reblog user and problogger reader who is curious what you think about this compared to the online RSS readers mentioned in your piece above. If you’d like someone technical to help you set it up (no charge) feel free to drop me a line privately at the email in my address.
I’ve tried most of them and FeedLounge is the only one which finally got me to drop a great desktop client (NewsFire). FeedLounge doesn’t seem to get as many props as it should, so it’s glad to see it in this article. :)
Had a quick look and I think I’ll stick with NewsGator Online – of all of them nothing really got me excited (I couldn;t even get to the attensa site) – they all seem cramped and cluttered whereas NG Online has a clean UI and does the basics. Also the syncing with FeedDemon is a major plus.
Although, I just hope the sluggish performance improves – don’t know why they had to roll out the new design (ie: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it)
I’ve used Pluck for a long time and haven’t found anything to make me want to switch. It works for me, for the way I use a reader…might not be everybody’s cup-o-joe, but I like it.
[…] Frank, thanks for the comparison. Darren, thanks for the link… but if you were any kind of ProBlogger, you’d be able to afford a better mugshot than the one you’re currently using… […]
I use a combination of rss2email and GMail – http://www.aigarius.com/2006/01/01/aggregation-the-g.html
And also Linux Weekly News recently reviewed best aggregators for Linux – http://lwn.net/Articles/176028/
I use the Wizz RSS extension for Firefox. For me, it’s the best solution.
Here there are other 3 FREE WEB-BASED FEED READERS:
http://feedsaggregator.codicesorgente.it
http://www.circus.it
http://riassunto.jk.it
I may be a little biased since I like everything google produces, but I have to say that I really enjoy using google reader. It may not have all the options and bells and whsitles, but it is sooooo pleasing to use.
The web feed readers never fit my style, same with e-mail.
I’m using Liferea for reading newsfeeds on my Linux box. It’s a very powerful tool, Liferea can even save a username and password for feeds that require one.
http://liferea.sourceforge.net/
[…] Thanks to Darren’s entry, I found this comparison of 9 different web based feed readers. Personally I use Bloglines but there are other flavors of readers each with their own features and selling points. […]
The review was very ordinary if you ask me, nothing much comprehensive at all. It was just a basic brush at the different services available and serious does not deserve this hype.
Bloglines is fabolous but too complacent,could use tagging.
Newsgator sucks and Rojo is decent. Feedlounge is great but not worth the $5/month, so yeah!
If you are interested in this topic, you could check out the “Perfect Feedreader”. It’s my own 25 points which would make a feedreader perfect.
There are many Online RSS feed readers and for select 1 according to our needs is a big task. This leads to the comparison of these feed readers. I found a detailed comparison, including Pros & Cons, of some of the best Online RSS feed readers at – http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=971829