There have been a rake of bugs, performance issues and down time for Netvibes ever since the launch of their Ginger release. I’m no longer happy with Netvibes as my feed reader.
They even added a Google search bar to their header last week. What’s that about? I know what Google is. I know how to get to Google.com. I know how to search. I don’t need a Google search within my feed reader. Netvibes claimed it was a feature longed for by its users but the comments on their blog post about it are very negative. Where are Netvibes pulling these ridiculous features from? Obviously they’re trying to get paid but it’s at the expense of users. Users like me who are now looking for an alternative.
Anyway. I’m looking for a new feed reader. I quite like Google Reader’s news ticker feature but I can’t stand looking at their UI. Bloglines? PageFlakes?
What do you use and do you recommend it and why?
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting! Cormac
11 responses so far ↓
1 Donn // Jul 4, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I’ve been through a few of them at this stage and haven’t come across any I’ve been totally happy with.
I started off using the Sage extension in Firefox back in the early days when I was only subscribed to a few feeds, that did me fine for a while until my list of feeds started to increase a bit and it just felt that I needed something a little more than an extension. After that I moved onto some stand alone applications, RSS Owl was the first one, don’t remember much about it but I don’t think I used if for long. I used Feed Reader for a good while but it felt like it was somewhat lacking.
Up to that point I think I just had the feed reader apps installed on my work machine only, when I decided to install it on both machines I looked for an app that would synch up my feeds so I moved onto Blog Bridge. I was pretty happy with this for a good while as I had my feeds on both machines, after a while though it just seemed to stop synching things properly and eventually I gave up on it.
After that I started looking more at web based feed readers and just decided to go with Google Reader for now as I couldn’t be arsed searching around for a new one. I’m really not too fond of it but at least my feeds are all in one place and when something is marked as read that’s it sorted no matter where I check it from. I find the interface really ugly and spent quite a while looking at themes people have created for it, all of which were hideous. I find it quite slow sometimes as well but I’ll probably stick with it until I randomly come across something better.
That’s probably no help to you at all, just a list of feed readers I don’t like really as I haven’t come across the perfect solution yet.
2 Cormac Moylan // Jul 4, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Hi Donn. I used RSS Owl for a bit too when I first got into feeds. Didn’t like it much. It looked, felt and acted like a run of the mill unfriendly open source application.
The only desktop reader I actually liked is NetNewsWire for OS X. It’s a great piece of software. Lovely UI, quick, friendly to use.
I might take a look at the themes for Google Reader if I get a chance.
(Great comment btw, longer than my post
)
3 Cormac Moylan // Jul 4, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Oh, the reader in Mail.app is also great.
4 Donn // Jul 4, 2008 at 1:00 pm
I’m not a mac user so NetNewsWire and Mail aren’t an option for me. The search continues….
5 Cormac Moylan // Jul 4, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I’ve looked at Rojo, Bloglines and PageFlakes in the last hour. Bloglines is the best of a bad bunch but it offers less than Netvibes does for me. I might be turning to Google Reader…ohh nooo!
6 Aidan Finn // Jul 4, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I use NetNewsWire client on Mac. It’s part of a suite of feed tools from NewsGator. They also have clients for Windows, mobiles, outlook and a Web interface. Plus they sync your feed reading to the web service so you can keep your feeds in sync across several machines. So you can access your feeds from Mac, Windows and the Web and keep them all in sync.
http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/Default.aspx
7 Cormac Moylan // Jul 4, 2008 at 4:23 pm
It would seem logical to move to NewsGator since I use NetNewsWire too.
Aidan, quick question. How do I configure NewsGator to display the entry inline instead of opening a new window when I choose the summary view as my display option?
8 Aidan Finn // Jul 4, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Cormac, if you have summary view checked in display options, you can use the +/- button at the left of the text to expand from summary to full text.
9 Cormac // Jul 4, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Thanks.
10 Dave Jeffery // Jul 4, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Have a look at some of the themes available for google reader.
I’m using Jon Hicks’ work in progress “Helvetireader” at the moment: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hicksdesign/2622564140/in/photostream/
There’s lots more themes at userstyles.org
11 Paul M. Watson // Jul 5, 2008 at 10:59 pm
I use Google Reader. The UI doesn’t get in the way, it just lists unread items from 300+ feeds and lets me power through them. Shortcut keys J (next), K (previous), V (open item link) are all you need. You don’t even need the subscription list on the left when reading.
But having sat with Chris G. through his use of Netvibes I realise that Two-Panel/River-of-News UIs like Google Reader, Bloglines etc. are not for everyone. I find Netvibes and co. to be a real pain for getting through 300+ feeds.
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