I am currently in the market for a web based RSS feed reader to give me some ability to keep up with my news feeds while I am at work. Unfortunately I can’t install a desktop based feed reader on the computers we have because we have a pretty decent admin department aparently.
After trying out bloglines and a few other like it I was very unsatisfied. I guess you could say I was spoiled by NetNewsWire these past few months … but it just doesn’t cut it. Theoretically, in order to keep my feed reading all sync’d up nicely, this is the only feed reader I would use, even on my desktop, and the offerings were just not good enough to replace NetNewsWire.
Thinking about other web applications and what makes them great. I had a thought … AJAX. If you haven’t heard of AJAX, it basically turns webpages into real applications. The possibilities are endless. The livesearch used on this site is AJAX powered. To my absolute lack of surprise, someone already had this idea … two people in fact that I have found.
FeedLounge.com – Written by Alex King. It is in a private alpha stage right now and the only taste I got of it was a screenshot on the front page of the site, but this program looks like the holy grail for web based RSS reading. I signed up to hopefully become a beta tester and make FeedLounge as good as possible. It appears that this will be a sign-up service like bloglines as opposed to a piece of software I could run on my own server and not have to worry about massive amounts of traffic and database slowdowns, but I am willing to make compromises :)
Tiny Tiny RSS – This is a very early release version of the software, but so far it is very slick. I installed it on my server and tried it out as well as trying out the demo he has up. Check that out if you don’t really know what AJAX is all about.
I can’t wait till these applications mature. I think they will both have thier own place and will both be widely used. I know I will use them.
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