Looking at my stats of the type of RSS subscribers that I have the hits come from Firefox bookmarks, bloglines, some use Flock, a few using lifearea for Linux and then the rest just show up as a Java based feed reader when no more information is available.

I thought it would be interesting for me to sign up with a few of the most popular RSS feed readers and see how my feed looks in each of them and some of the features that each RSS aggregator service offers you.

Bloglines

The sign up is fairly simple and quick, you are shown the top feeds after the sign up and you can choose as you please. The navigation seems pretty straight forward with add, edit and options right at the top left along with all the feeds you have subscribed too right below it.

For every feed you can view posts ranging from all up to your current session. With their Hotkeys you can easily navigate without too much clicking around.

You can make folders, create email subscriptions, tell friends, import, export, recommend and a whole bunch of other things. The ‘Playlists‘ function is basically creating a startpage for a bunch of RSS feeds that you subscribe to and have them with drag and drop functionality.

Tip: Clicking the little icon next to each feed lets you edit the description of the RSS feed to whatever you like.

Bloglines is one of the most popular RSS subscription services, below is what a typical post entry would like in their feed service -

(click to view on flickr)

Netvibes

I like NetVibes even though I never set myself up, well I finally did today. From the numerous ways that you can organize your content, Netvibes offers you a lot of flexibility with their drag and drop windows that you can could literally spend hours configuring your life on this page.

Basically it will make your online life more organized. You can obviously add your own feeds, which I promptly did to see how it looks.

The feed window opens up with lightning speed in a separate on-site pop up and shows you the amount of the posts that you want to see on a side panel and a simple click opens them up in the next. You can add video feeds as well.

Screenshot of how a feed looks in Netvibes -

(click to view on flickr)

Pageflakes

Another start page only web application, Pageflakes has grown rather quick. Though missing the sidepanel that Netvibes has it still gets the job done, albeit at the expense of a few more mouse clicks.  With Pageflakes though I found the RSS reader slightly better than Netvibes.

You have the option to either read the post in the RSS reader which shows up as an on-site pop up and can be viewed either in Outlook View or Newspaper View. Plus all your subscribed feeds show up in the pop up side panel when you click any feed - so that is really handy.

The other features are the use of Hotkeys and being able to sort your subcribed feeds from within the RSS reader. I think Pageflakes has a better RSS reader than Netvibes.

Tip: In PageFlakes in the RSS reader window that pops up there is a small icon next to the orange ‘RSS’ button click it to get a live preview of the site in a frame - this can only be done in Outlook View.

Have a look -

(click to view on flickr)

My Yahoo

The number 1 portal site ranked by many traffic measuring services also lets you build your own front portal with ‘My Yahoo’. Adding RSS feeds here can be a little bit more cumbersome than the other start pages mentioned above. When you click on ‘Add Content’ you are taken to a general page where you can choose the type of content you want to add. Even though the tiny text is there that says Add RSS by URL, it took me at least 15 more seconds to find (too much by industry standards). The bigger text and logos for their own services was distracting.

Now within My Yahoo itself they do not have a specific RSS reader so when you click on a feed item you are taken to the respective site.

I noticed that in NetVibes and My Yahoo the favicons of the original site show up even though the feed gets redirected from Feedburner. However in PageFlakes you see Feedburner’s favicon when the feed comes from the same source. Interesting.

This is what a feed summary looks like with My Yahoo.

(click to view on flickr)

Google Reader

Some people have said that it is possibly one of the best RSS readers out there. The options are quite impressive. In the Goodies tab, under settings you can drag a “Next” link to your bookmarks bar and surf your RSS feeds one by one by clicking Next over and over again. This is handy for those people why like to read the article in its original settings. You can also specify a certain tag to it which will correspond to a category you created for your feeds and use that for specific RSS browsing.

Addition of your RSS feeds to your personalized Google homepage is the other Goodie apart from others.

Making folders, assigning feeds to folders and more personalization can all be done in your settings panel.

Google Reader is exactly that it only reads feeds and doesn’t do anything else, there isn’t even a Google search bar at the top of your page. Which is why probably some people might prefer it more for its ability to do one thing and to do it right.

Tip: When scrolling a feed in Google Reader as you scroll down the feeds keep getting picked up and show at the bottom. I haven’t seen that with any other RSS reader.

Feed view in Google Reader.

(click to view on flickr)

Windows Live

Windows Live offers you the chance to also make a personal start page for you other than also being a search engine. Click on Add Stuff at the top left, select Advanced Options and just enter the URL of the feed and click on Subscribe, that’s it. The content gets added to your start page, you can drag and drop to place it as you wish.

Though not as advanced as NetVibes and PageFlakes with the RSS readers popping up so you don’t have to leave the page, Live also has another purpose which is to make you search.

The nice thing about the little preview window is that you can just hover over the title and see a little snippet of the post and click through if you feel like. Also if images are part of the post they are shown fading in and out. Nice touch indeed.

View of RSS feed in Live

(click to view on flickr)

So mostly my feed didn’t look that different at all in most of the situations where the full post was shown. It is just a matter of preference which one you like the most.

I’m going to stop here and let you try out the rest of the RSS readers out there.

FeedReader, NewsGator, Rojo, FeedLounge, NewsAlloy, Bloogz, Alesti, OneLurv, Gregarius, FeedBucket.

The list doesn’t end here, I just got tired of doing this.

So which is your preferred RSS reader?

Technorati Tags: rss, google, pageflakes, netvibes, readers, live, bloglines

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.