Apr 12, 2006 | blog
I have to admit that NewsAlloy is my current favorite of the free online news aggregators. It has many of the features that a true RSS junkie needs to manage their feeds, and enjoy reading. Its probably the most advanced news reader of all the free online offerings that I’ll review.
Primer
As I’ve done before, here are some links in case you would like to read up on what RSS, ATOM, Web Feeds, OPML, and news aggregators are.
Features
This is what seperates NewsAlloy from the rest. It truely is a real news aggregator, with all the trimmings. Feed management, archiving, rating of feeds, favorites, simple exporting of OMPL, and extensive account settings to manage the views, archiving, tags, actions and more. NewsAlloy really does compare with a stand-alone product offering, but is a fantastic value, especially when you consider that their is no software to install, and is browser independent. It works flawlessly in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, so bring your favorite browser!
Interface
(IMAGE) This is one item that I have not elaborated on in my reviews for NewsGator Online and Attensa Online, mainly because there was not much to talk about. The list of feeds were on the left, the reading pane on the right, simple as that. You click, you read.
NewsAlloy, however, is different in that there is much more to the interface. Yes, the two-pane layout is the same as the others, but because of the feature set, you have more items and controls in the interface. The interface makes full use of the AJAX techniques that have come to infuse all “Web 2.0” sites. On the left, you have the Folders & Shortcuts area that gives you one-click access to multiple “Folders” including Inbox, Archive, Trash, Pinned, Rated, All, and Unread. These shortcuts simplify getting to the major portions of NewsAlloy.
Below Folders & Shortcuts, there is the Channels area, which is actually where you organize your feeds. Consider “channels” folders, and you’ll get the idea. You can have subchannels of channels, so you can organize a “News” channel with specific subchannels for “Politics”, “Sports”, “Technology” and so on. Or start with a top-level channel for “Blogs” and subchannels for “Friends”, “A-Listers” and so on. There is also a toolbar for this section that allows you, with one click, to (from left to right): Export selection as OPML, Create a new Channel, Move selected Channels, Delete selected Channels, Reload Channels Pane, and Reset the selection.
In the viewing pane, you can manipulate the individual posts of a feed. On the right-hand side of the screen, within easy reach, are tools for selecting, expanding, moving, deleting, pinning, subscribing, mailing and exporting. The text, backgound and layout of the actual post is easy to read and allows for quick scanning of the text. The font is easy on the eyes, and does not induce strain – at least for me. Pictures within posts are rendered in their proper places, and the overall post presentation is quite nice.
At the top of the viewing pane, there are 6 tabs that allow you to quickly navigate to the different settings and tools withing NewsAlloy. These tabs are for News (the default), Manage, Settings, My Account, Feedback, and Feed Directory. Overall, its laid out fairly well, everything can be found in a few clicks.
Performance
For me, NewsAlloy has had great performance with some annoyances – though remember it is still in beta. I have had some issues with the service, performance was horrid when I loaded it up with over 100 feeds and didn’t read anything for about two weeks. When I came back, I had around 3300 posts that needed to be dealt with. But I was negligent in managing my read/unread feeds/posts and so my account quickly had so many posts, that it took several seconds to process a read, move, or delete command. With this in mind, I took several minutes about a week ago and cleaned out a number of extraneous feeds and posts, marked them all read, and simply deleted them, as I had already read them in another aggregator. Since then, I’ve noticed what I originally saw in NewsAlloy, a speedy quick news reader with a lot of features.
Usability
The interface of NewsAlloy does take a bit to get used to, it is more advanced than other freebie online news readers. The layout is familiar and the features you need are all there – and all right on the screen. This doesn’t make it cluttered, but it does take awhile to learn what each icon is for, and how to use them. So, usability is not “bad”, it just is hindered slightly by need to pack stand-alone functionality into a web page. I’d say NewsAlloy has done a rather good job of this, though I’m betting that they are going to continue to improve the interface as this product progresses through its beta.
Summary
NewsAlloy is my favorite online reader – no two ways about it. I’m going to continue to keep this account long after I’ve shut down the other online readers, simply because it is much more powerful then the competition, and is quite fast. My daily aggregator is actually Pluck for Internet Explorer, which I’ll talk about another day, but I could see myself switching to NewsAlloy for simplicities sake.
- Pros: Quick, powerful, high-end features for a web app, no software install, browser independent
- Cons: Learning curve, less intuitive than other offerings, currently in beta (though open to public)
Technorati tags: news-aggregators, newsalloy, rss-reader
Apr 9, 2006 | blog
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Overview
Attensa Online is a free basic RSS reader, available via both Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Similar to NewsGator, Attensa has products for purchase that fill a more feature-packed roll as News Readers. Attensa for Outlook ties into Microsoft Outlook similar to NewsGator Inbox, and Attensa Mobile (available soon) is targeted to mobile device users. The free Attensa Online product also plays a role in the other product offerings, mainly as a central synchronization tool, so you can access your feeds from anywhere.
Accessing news from anywhere has always been a useful part of the Internet experience. And Attensa Online answers that need in full with a simple, easy to use, speedy news reader. Attensa can be accessed from anywhere via browser, using a nice AJAX interface that makes reading your feeds quick and simple.
Primer
Before we get too far into this review, here are some links to read up on what RSS, ATOM, Web Feeds, OPML, and news aggregators are.
Features
The main attraction of Attensa is the simplicity of the interface. The list of feeds are on the left, while the scrollable reading pane is on the right. I was impressed with the ability to scroll the reading pane while the feed list remained stationary on the left. NewsGator Online does not have this ability, and you will enjoy not having to scroll back to the top of the page to move to your next feed. In addition, you can adjust the reading pane using three different view types. One displays the feed contents in a one-line-per-post view that makes efficient use of space, the second option shows two lines of the body of each post in a list view. Both of these view options use the upper-half of the reading pane for the list, and use the bottom half as a viewing pane – there are options to turn this off/on. The third (and my choice) shows three lines of the body text of each post, and allows for more space in the view list. The bottom viewing pane is not available in this view and each click of a feed’s post opens a new browser window (or tab) that displays the full post at the respective website.
There are the standard tools which allow you to mark posts/feeds as read, delete them, import new feeds via OPML, or add them manually. Again, there is no method for exporting your list of feeds once you’ve set them up. You can manage the feeds, by folder or category, but little else.
Usability
The simplicity of the AJAX implementation here is great, because all commands are available via a right-click on a feed or folder. It is quite intuitive to right-click and “mark all read/unread”, or to delete the feeds/folders. Performance was snappy in both Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 1.5 with very little hesitation between feed loads.
Summary
The casual or “newbie” RSS consumer will appreciate the simplicity and easy to read layout of Attensa online. Similar to NewsGator Online, seasoned RSS users would probably pass on the service as it simply does not offer any compelling functionality to match more mature feature-rich news aggregators.
- Pros: Fast, simple to use, easy to read layout, tie-ins to other product offers
- Cons: No export utility, restricted view options, other products offer little incentive to use service, online service is limited to other Attensa products
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Apr 6, 2006 | blog
Reviews Intro:
Now I mentioned NewsGator to a coworker awhile ago and the first question they couldn’t wait to ask is “You mean that spy ware company?”. Of course NewsGator has nothing to do with the old “Gator” spy ware stuff from many years ago, but it’s curious that people still relate the name.
At any rate, this review is one in a number (not sure how many) on free RSS Readers. There will be some online products, some offline products, and some that cross the line using features of both. Along with NewsGator Online, I’m planning on reviewing NewsAlloy, Pluck, Attensa, and as many other free news readers that I can in the next few weeks. At work, I’ve got a chance at a large team meeting at the end of April to present the virtues of news readers, and I figured I’d share that information here.
Primer
Here are some links to read up on what RSS, ATOM, Web Feeds, OPML, and news aggregators are.
About NewsGator
NewsGator has a number of feed reader products – NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox & FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macintosh. NewsGator Online is a “Web 2.0” product that uses some AJAX features in its interface. The design is similar to other online news readers where your list of feeds is on the left and the content on the right. It does not use panes or any kind of scrolling system, so your feed list on the left will move up as you scroll down in the post list of the feed.
Features
Since the product is online, you don’t need to download and install any software, set any proxy or port information, or use your bandwidth for synchronizing data. In addition, you can use the online account to sync your feeds with one of the previously mentioned “pay for” software choices above. I’ve got a coworker who uses the NewsGator Inbox and is very satisfied with it. You can import your feeds into the system and start reading right away. While the free web version does not allow you to change the update frequency of the newsfeed, the standard sync frequency seems to work fine for the average reader, however, hardcore RSS junkies will miss being in control of synchronization times.
In each post section, there are three little icons and a set of five gray stars. These tools allow you to mark individual posts as read, add the post to the “Clippings” folder, and the ability to forward the post to an email account. The stars allow you to rate the post. These ratings will flow back to the original source (if they have a NewsGator account) and also help to show other users online determine if this feed/post is of value.
The My Clippings folder is quite useful for “clipping” a favorite post and storing it for later reference. You can also syndicate your My Clippings folder in RSS, and make it available to the public. Its kind of a neat way of saving important posts from a variety of feeds.
The AJAX interface of NewsGator Online worked well in Internet Explorer, but worked better in Firefox. I believe the key on this is to have a current Java VM as AJAX makes significant use of JAVA, and my IE6SP2 install only has the limited MS Java VM installed. Some of the functionality I missed using IE6 were right-click options. These range from marking items as read, deleting, moving, expanding/collapsing, Unsubscribe, and “visit site”. These right-click menu options worked wonderfully in Firefox, and I’ll be installing an updated Java VM on my main home machine to test this out.
Additional features allow you to add a Blogroll to your blog from NewsGator Online, supply an OPML URL, add a NewsGator auto-subscribe link on your blog, add NewsGator ratings to your site, and offer API options to developers. The knowledge base was consistent and easy to use. Structured in a hierarchical format, the articles were easy to read and the system was quick. The customary FAQ was easily found and contained helpful starter how-to’s.
The one downside to the knowledge base, was that once deep within the system, there was no easy link at the top or bottom of the otherwise cleanly designed page to go back to the “reader” view. A few simply “back” clicks get me to where I wanted, but a simple “Reader” link would be better.
Performance
This online news reader was rather quick. I’ve seen faster ones (Attensa for example), but
Dislikes
I actually like this product and may keep my free account, but I did see some strange behavior when marking posts as read. When you click on the folder instead of expanding the folder, then mark the feeds as read, the folder closes. If you expand the folder, then marking fields in a feed as read does not close the folder. This makes sense, but when you click on the folder it appears to expand the folder and allow you to click on feeds, so it is a little confusing.
Summary
To finish up, I find that I like the speed, flexibility, style and ease of use of the NewsGator Online product. Here’s how I rate it (1 being low and 5 being high).
- Pros: Good performance, adequate features, easy to use, nice blog add-on options, neat custom “My Clippings” folder
- Cons: Some odd behavior in Internet Explorer (Java related), can’t set sync schedule, can’t export feed list.
UPDATE: I have to take back what I said about IE6 – at least for some installations the same full functionality will be available. After re-building my day-to-day system with a clean install of XPSP2, I find that all the AJAX functionality in Firefox is also here. Must have something messed up on my other system (sorry).
UPDATE2: While I was unable to find an export function, Jonathon McDougall from NewsGator recommends the following tip to save your OPML. Enjoy!
- Log into your account and go to My Settings | Edit Locations
- Under each location you will see an OPML link. You can choose to make the URL to your OPML public, or if you view your OPML online, you can save it to a file.
Thank you Jonathon!
UPDATE3: Check out the review of NewsGator Mobile at Arne Hess’ the::unwired!
Apr 2, 2006 | blog
A week ago, my manager pulls me aside and shows me a list of all the web sites that I had hit the previous month, since I was in the “Top 10” users of the ‘net that month. What makes me laugh about this is that I was not in the Top 10 for the previous few years! Also, the way our company “measures” Internet usage is inaccurate – the number of web hits in a month is meaningless – and this seems to be the only measurement they are using. What about amount of data transferred per site, or the amount of time per site?
Anyway, the gist of all this is that after explaining why my usage is “up” and why I expected it to go much higher, is from the use of RSS feeds. Once she understood what RSS was, she asked if I would present an overview at our next team meeting at the end of April. So I’m going to start reviewing low/no cost RSS readers over the next few weeks. The emphasis will be on ease of use, features, cost, performance. I’ll try to be impartial, but I’ll admit up front that I’ve been using RSS/ATOM/XML aggregators for over 2 years now and have found what works for me – though I’m always looking for something better.
So watch over the next several weeks, I’ll have some reviews up for your review!
Dec 19, 2005 | blog
Microsoft has selected the icon to represent RSS feeds in Internet Explorer 7. More information about this decision is available on the RSS Team Blog over at MSDN Blogs.
