Why Google Reader isn't my RSS reader
by Brian Brown (follow me on Twitter): September 29, 2006
Google Reader is Google's brand of RSS reader and is a pretty good option to keep track of all your feeds. This week, they came out with all kinds of new bells and whistles, but it still isn't my reader of choice, at least not yet.
And I did give them a try because I love Google. My email is G-mail and my calendar is Google Calendar so it's safe to say I'm smitten with some of their products. Unfortunately, their RSS reader is lacking the one feature I absolutely can not live without...live updating.
I'm puzzled at this. When someone writes me an email my browser automatically refreshes to tell me I have a new email. Furthermore, I can use a Firefox extension that gives me a pop-up whenever someone sends me an email. Therefore I always know when I've received something new.
Why doesn't their RSS reader do this? The RSS reader's format looks very similar to G-mail, but they haven't included this one function that would completely sell me.
For now, I'll stick with my current RSS reader, Great News, which has a similar format to Google Reader, but does give me "live" updates (every 15 minutes) of new posts being written and provides a pop-up to tell me so. Now that I'm used to this feature, I can't live without it.
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You can try AgileRss news aggregator. It provides a minimum of necessary features such as virtual feeds support, newspaper view, import/ export in OPML format, search feeds with specialized search engines, browser bookmarklet for rss feed autodiscovery, groups subscribed feeds into custom categories, filter items but the most usefull for me is the news ticker.
Posted by: Silvestru | November 07, 2006 at 03:22 AM