Sunday, March 25th, 2007...8:57 am
RSS Feed Readers
I finally got around to playing with some feed readers today and I must say I’m impressed. My experience with them in the past has never been good but the fact that my daily reading list has grown so big has forced me to start looking for a more efficient and streamlined way of getting through it.
So I spent a couple of hours testing out a few different readers and in the end the two that really impressed me were Netvibes and Google Reader.
Netvibes has a really polished design. It’s not too flashy and never feels slow. On the other hand Google Reader has a simpler minimalistic interface which I also find appealing.
It’s hard choosing between the two so I’m going to play with them a little more before I decide which one I’m going to stick with.
If you’ve never tried a feed reader I really suggest giving these two a try. You’ll be surprised how much time you can save.
23 Comments
March 25th, 2007 at 9:13 am
I’m a huge fan of Google Reader. It’s easy to use, available for any computer (since it’s web-based) and I can even read it on my cell phone. Their mobile WAP version is excellent. This is important because I, like you, have far more to read and less time than I did even a year ago. I confess that I read my RSS feeds (full articles including graphics!) while in line at the grocery store or bank.
March 25th, 2007 at 9:18 am
It looks like having a web browser on my phone is going to finally come in handy. Why not be efficient with your time even while your away from your computer? Sounds good to me.
March 25th, 2007 at 10:16 am
i like bloglines.com as the reader for me. however, when it is not working which is far and few in-between, my backup is Google Reader.
March 25th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I love Google reader as it gives an easy interface to collect and read feeds
March 25th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
I use Netvibes, and quite frankly I think that its great
its not to slow on the loading times and has alot of great features. I haven’t used Google Reader though.
I don’t however plan on moving from Netvibes as it works perfectly fine for me.
March 25th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
I like google reader. Only recently did I start to read feeds. About a year ago I started using sharp reader but I hated it so much I went back to bookmarks.
March 25th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
I would vote of Google reader… It has much sophisticated features compared with NetVibes.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:01 am
10 bucks says you’re going with Google Reeader..
(tip: do try the awesome keyboard shortcuts)
March 26th, 2007 at 12:06 am
AL it’s really hard to choose. I might have to use both, alternating every second day.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:12 am
I like Google Reader a lot. The only thing is that if you have it open a long time you’ll see your memory usage skyrocket.. 160-300K.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:19 am
RyanB is that with Firefox? I’ll have to keep an eye on that.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:27 am
Yes with firefox, usually with Gmail, Google Reader, and a story at a time open. I don’t know what your list looks like, but I have 150ish feeds. I can easily get 800+ stories in a few hours or a day. So if you just keep scrolling to it eats ram. For the hell of it I scrolled to 10k posts, I was around 400k.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:33 am
RyanB I’m no stranger to memory issues with Firefox.
My record is 732 meg of ram.
I reckon with as many feeds as you have Netvibes would drop well before Google Reader.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:37 am
How in the hell…
What do you mean drop? like not be able to call that many? I bet so…
March 26th, 2007 at 1:39 am
I abuse Firefox pretty badly.
When I say drop I mean either crash or freeze Firefox. All those fancy effects that Netvibes has comes at a price.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:42 am
I have 7 tabs open right now. I usually stay under 15 or so..
March 26th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I prefer Google Reader , it rocks for me .
March 26th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
I use Thunderbird for my reader, I get all my mail and news in one place!
March 27th, 2007 at 7:38 am
I’m partial to Google Reader myself. Fast and easy to use, with a simple interface. You can also get a Greasemonkey script that adds your Google Reader Feeds into Gmail to really save time
March 28th, 2007 at 4:28 am
For feeds I use IE7… seems like I’m the only one!
If I accessed RSS feeds on different computers I’d use Google Reader but I don’t so it’s not as useful for me. The thing I love about IE7 is the fact that feeds are just one click away.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:50 am
I’ve been using RSSBandit but since my machine at work and my machine at home don’t have the seem feeds its a bit of a bother that way. RSSBandit does allowed for uploading the feeds to a server and the being able to download them from a different location but it doesn’t support sFTP which is what my servers have.
Google’s Feed reader would be nice, I haven’t tried it on my blackberry yet, but that would solve my sync issue between home and work. Though I like how RSSBandit have the notify on the task bar to tell me when a new feed has come in. Does Google have a API or something that can do this?
March 29th, 2007 at 8:54 am
If you’re a Firefox user, there’s an easy add-on for Google Reader that you can download here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3977
I already use add-on notifiers for Gmail and even Google Calendar, and they work great.
April 21st, 2007 at 12:47 pm
also worth looking the link-cloud format feed reader, feedmashr.com
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