Here is the ninth edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup. Today, we will review 11 online feed readers, from Bloglines to Wizz RSS. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online feed reader.
With the help of many contributors, we completed the Feed Reader section of the Office 2.0 Database. From the 11 players we identified for this article, all but two (Feedeye and Newshutch) are actively developed by legitimate companies. We also focused on dedicated feed readers, therefore did not include applications such as Netvibes that provide feed reading capabilities among many other features.
Functionality
From a functionality standpoint, an online feed reader lets you subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds, and read their content online. Most applications support the importing and exporting of feed collections using the popular OPML format. Half of the applications we reviewed support the sharing of feed collections with colleagues and friends, a third support their publishing, and another third support syndication. Only two provide an API (Bloglines and NewsAlloy), and none provide support for any kind of branding. Last but not least, some applications support social aspects such as user rating, tagging, and recommendations, with Rojo clearly leading the pack in this area.
Ease of Migration
Migrating from an offline feed reader to an online alternative is borderline trivial. All you really have to do is export your feed collection as an OPML file, then import it back into your online feed reader. The only thing you might lose in the process is the information about which posts have been read, and which have not, therefore it is recommended that you do this when your inbox is empty. Also, if you have been using your email client as a feed reader, forwarding a post to someone via email might become slightly more difficult, even though the best feed readers we tested support this feature, and sometimes even have it integrated with your address book, like Google Reader does in conjunction with Gmail.
Price
From all the applications we reviewed, only two offer a commercial version (FeedLounge and NewsGator), and only one among them (FeedLounge) does not offer a free version. Why anyone would pay for an online feed reader is beyond me though. From a business model standpoint, the vendors we reviewed either rely on advertising, or leverage what really is a loss leader application as a marketing tool, as is the case for Google Reader owned by Google, or Bloglines owned by InterActiveCorp.
Alternatives
The main alternative to a dedicated online feed reader is an online desktop that provides a built-in feed reader, Netvibes being the most popular among them. Another common alternative is to use a portal such as My Yahoo!, which ranks in the sixth position from all the feed readers and aggregators that subscribe to the IT|Redux blog.
Top 10 Players
Several online feed readers do make use of HTTPS, therefore the Alexa ranking is not as reliable as we would like it to be. Nevertheless, and according to this ranking, we can extrapolate a Top 10 list of players in the space, which is strongly corroborated by their respective Google PageRanks, and by the FeedBurner rank generated from the 1,294 current subscribers to the IT|Redux blog.
- 1. Google Reader [Alexa Rank: 3 | Google PageRank: 10 | FeedBurner: 1]
- 2. Bloglines [Alexa Rank: 487 | Google PageRank: 9 | FeedBurner: 3]
- 3. NewsGator [Alexa Rank: 3,430 | Google PageRank: 9 | FeedBurner: 4]
- 4. Rojo [Alexa Rank: 7,098 | Google PageRank: 8 | FeedBurner: 8]
- 5. Newshutch [Alexa Rank: 45,929 | Google PageRank: 5 | FeedBurner: N/A]
- 6. Wizz RSS [Alexa Rank: 61,319 | Google PageRank: 7 | FeedBurner: 45]
- 7. NewsAlloy [Alexa Rank: 121,614 | Google PageRank: 7 | FeedBurner: 29]
- 8. FeedLounge [Alexa Rank: 125,473 | Google PageRank: 6 | FeedBurner: 36]
- 9. Gritwire [Alexa Rank: 289,704 | Google PageRank: 5 | FeedBurner: N/A]
- 10. Feeds 2.0 [Alexa Rank: 489,210 | Google PageRank: 6 | FeedBurner: 54]
Editor's note: Alexa only ranks primary domains, not subdomains. Therefore, traffic generated by Google Reader is lost among the traffic generated by all applications provided by Google. Nevertheless, Google Reader holds the top spot for the readers subscribed to the IT|Redux blog, with 388 subscriptions, followed by Netvibes with 239, and Bloglines with 177. Therefore, it should be safe to say that Google Reader is the most popular online feed reader, at least for technology-oriented folks.
Quick Reviews
There are only 11 applications in our database, so all of them got a review.
Bloglines: Bloglines is the second most popular online feed reader after Google Reader, and certainly one of the most feature rich. It provides advanced feed searching, blog publishing, and social sharing tools, a mobile version optimized for handheld computers and cell phones, email subscriptions to help manage your e-newsletter traffic, personalized recommendations to find new subscriptions, a bookmarklet for single-click subscriptions to any source, and notifiers for all browser types to remind you when new articles have arrived. It is available in 10 languages
Feedeye: Feedeye is the personal work of two Australian developers, Hourann Bosci and Daniel Foote, and is a basic yet effective online feed reader. It supports the publishing of feed sets, and can manage up to 25 sets with 40 feeds each.
Feeds 2.0: Feeds 2.0 is trying to solve the issue of information overload by being smarter about the way posts are sorted and displayed. Feeds 2.0 ranks the feeds according to the user's preferences, and does real time automated clustering of similar items aggregated from different sources. The application is currently in private beta, therefore it is too early to tell whether it's really working or not, but the concept, developed by a startup company in Greece, is definitely interesting.
Google Reader: Google Reader is the most popular online feed reader currently available, and possibly one of the most efficient. It's extremely fast, and its user interface makes it very quick to go from post to post by simply hitting the space bar. Google Reader also makes it easy to share items with others, or to send posts via email. The only limitation seems to be the lack of a feed searching interface, which is totally mind boggling for a tool developed by the leading search company.
Gritwire: Gritwire is a very sexy feed reader that also provides a simple bookmark manager, a basic contact manager, and a couple other useful widgets. As such, it could have been recorded under the desktop category, but its core feature is its feed reader, hence its place in this roundup.
NewsAlloy: NewsAlloy provides a fast user interface, unlimited news archive with intuitive organization through folders or channels, integration with popular social services, email sending and HTML archiving (a fairly unique feature), keyboard shortcuts, tags, flags, and a blogroll API.
NewsGator: NewsGator provides an extensive collection of feed readers for virtually any platform, as well as an online edition, which has a fairly comprehensive feature set, even-though its performance, as tested by Frank Gruber for this excellent article published by TechCrunch, is not on par with the other applications we reviewed.
Newshutch: Newshutch sports a streamlined interface reminiscent of Google Reader, and provides a truly unique and innovative feature: the ability to print all entries from a feed for true offline reading. Newshutch is the personal project of two developers, Nathan Bowers and Doug McInnes.
Rojo: Rojo is the most social of all the feed readers we reviewed for this article. Beside being a very effective feed reader, it supports user rating, tagging, and recommendations, powered by the aptly named Rojo Mojo. Also, Rojo makes it easy to view the feeds that you read most often, and tracks which web pages your feeds are linking to. Rojo was acquired by Six Apart, makers of TypePad, in September 2006.
Wizz RSS: Wizz RSS is a funky feed reader available for Firefox, Java, mobile devices, and web browsers. Its feature set is fairly limited, but what sets it appart from the other applications we reviewed is its ability to be embedded on any website.
Personal Favorites
My first feed reader was Google Reader. I started using it back in August 2005, and I never looked for anything else since then. I love how easy it is to subscribe to feeds from it, and how fast I can go from post to post, having them disappear once read.
What's Missing
A search interface in Google Reader.
Best Online Feed Reader
Now that we know what's out there, it's time for a vote:
Note: if you cannot see the voting form, please follow this link.
Final results will be announced next week on Your Office 2.0 Setup and as an update to this post. In the meantime, please help me build next week's roundup on Presentation tools. You can use this form courtesy of Wufoo for suggesting new applications, or providing additional information about existing ones. I would also welcome ideas for domain-specific criteria that could be used for evaluating the players on our list.
See you next week!
Disclaimer: Google was a sponsor for the first Office 2.0 Conference.
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