rss

Feedly launches a news site made just for you

Love RSS feeds but are generally unhappy about the structured systems that let you browse them? You might like Feedly, a very nontraditional approach to viewing your favorite feeds that ends up feeling a lot like portal news sites of yore, but with a tight-knit social network built in to help you discover and share new content with friends.

The service, which is currently Firefox-only (how convenient) and requires you to install a small browser plug-in, will slurp up your bookmarks, social networking log-ins, news preferences, and an entire OPML file and will organize it on to various news pages.

The result is something some have coined as Yahoo 2.0, with each area of interest set up as its own news section--complete with top stories that change throughout the day.

You can read entire articles and feeds without having to visit the source site. For the purists, there's also a simple button you can click to bring up each article in a light boxed window on top of the feed. In fact, there are several ways to view content, either with large thumbnails and abstracts, or just headlines. My personal favorite is… Read more

Featured Freeware: FeedDemon and NetNewsWire

These well-crafted, standalone newsreaders makes an ideal choice for both novices who've never heard of an RSS feed and advanced users looking to put some oomph and flexibility into their reading habits. As the desktop clients for the online NewsGator, FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macs both can synchronize bi-directionally with their Web-based counterpart, making it easy to get your feeds wherever and whenever you need them.

Other useful features include a built-in Web browser that's built on Internet Explorer--sorry Firefox and Opera fans, tabbed browsing for when you need to open multiple feeds' Web pages, Watch … Read more

NewsGator introduces feed suggestions

NewsGator converted its popular RSS feed aggregation clients to freeware in January 2008, and now that seed has borne fruit: recommended fruit, to be precise.

Partnering with SenseArray, a collaborative filter from Uprizer Labs, NewsGator now offers live RSS feed recommendations from feeds that the user hasn't already subscribed to. Currently available only on the online NewsGator client, the filter pulls information from NewsGator as well as its sibling desktop clients, FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for the Mac so that users who synchronize their RSS data will be contributing to the list of recommendations.

Brian Kellner, NewsGator's … Read more

Snackr drenches your computer in a river of news

Marshall Kirkpatrick, over at ReadWriteWeb, turned me on to Snackr with a post from earlier today. Snackr describes itself as being an RSS ticker. It provides a constant river of news on your screen. Built with Adobe AIR, it is compatible across all platforms and looks really slick.

Snackr sits on one of the four sides of your screen and scrolls through recent posts from sites which are input either by hand or by loading an OPML file. A nice added touch is that if there is an image in the post, it is included in the scrolling entry. There … Read more

FeedDemon gets tweaked

Newsgator's FeedDemon, the formerly pay-for-play, now freeware, RSS feed catcher upgrades to Version 2.7 with one useful new tool and a flowering bunch of bug-fixes. The Mac version, NetNewsWire, has also been updated.

FeedDemon now lets users subscribe to multiple feeds at the same time, under the tool name Find Feeds. For longtime FeedDemon users, there are a stack of improvements that should be instantly noticeable to users who've raged against the occasional "flagged" feed drop and other problems synchronizing multiple configurations across several PCs and operating systems.

FeedDemon's biggest claim to fame in … Read more

'Wuthering Heights,' Wikipedia in 5-minute chunks

DailyLit, which offers entire books over e-mail and RSS in daily serialized chunks every day, is now offering information from Wikipedia on various topics.

The free service would be perfect for people who are short on time and don't mind digesting literature and information in 5 minutes at a time on their handheld.

The Wikipedia-based topics DailyLit is creating "tours" of major world religions (22 installments--compared with the 260 installments for Moby Dick), "Wine 101," presidents of the United States, "Best Picture" Oscar winners, famous poets, famous women in history, Greek mythology, famous … Read more

Google brings Reader for iPhone closer to desktop version

Google updated the iPhone version of its Reader product Monday. For the first time, mobile users will be able to star items for later and browse through items in a large list similar to the desktop version of the Web app. To view stories, users simply need to click on the headlines and the story will expand. In previous iterations, clicking a headline would take you to a new page, requiring users to click back before expanding another story.

One thing you can't do is expand several stories at once, meaning mobile users will need to have access to … Read more

Google Reader gets universal sharing and microblogging features

Google upgraded its Reader product yesterday with a handful of important new features that let people share content with anyone from any Web site.

Previously its sharing features were confined to whatever RSS feeds you were subscribed to. As a solution to this problem, Google has created a small bookmarklet users can add to their browser's toolbar to simply share whatever page they're looking at to their shared items feed. Users can also attach personal notes on these, or any other shared items in a similar fashion to Facebook's share or Tumblr's ReBlog implementation, which lets … Read more

Times: The newspaper newsreader for Mac

There are several solid newsreaders for Mac OS X including the popular NewsFire and NetNewsWire which I've talked about here before. But I found an application today which puts a different sort of visual spin on the standard newsreader. It's called Times and it organizes feeds in an entirely different, though immediately familiar way. One quick note: this application only works on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Most newsreaders offer a three-paned interface with your feed list on the left, headlines with summaries on the upper right, and full stories (once clicked) in the lower right. What … Read more