Mr. Gary Lee

David Grimmett commented on my last post - Saving Time with Blogging - that he would like to see what readers some of his fellow bloggers were using, so I IM’d a small group of the ones I talk to and took as informal a survey as you can probably take. I hope this article gives David and my other readers a broader range of options to choose from to see which program best fits their web surfing habits.

There are basically two kinds of readers out there

• Readers that Run Inside your Browser
• Stand Alone RSS Readers

InBrowser Readers
1) Google Reader - Easily the favorite reader amongst the small sample of bloggers I asked today. I was going to type out a review for it, but I found a great review online at Ryan Kennedy’s Blog. The ability to share your feeds with your friends is probably one of the best features of this RSS Reader. If you’re a GMail user, you might want to check out Jon Lee’s latest post on integrating Google Reader with your GMail.

2) Firefox Built-in RSS Reader - Most people don’t know this, but if you’re running Firefox, you already have a built in RSS Reader. It’s not the fanciest software in the world, but it gets it’s job done. Basically, any time you want to add a feed to your RSS Folder, you click on this icon in the address bar. When you want to check the latest articles from all your feeds, you just click on this folder and few it from there. Click on the article you want to read and firefox automatically takes you that page. This is Jeff Kee’s favorite Reader out of pure conevenience and habit.

3) NetVibes - Diggal recommended this to me as her RSS Reader of Choice. I checked it out and it’s basically a Personalized Home Page much like what Yahoo and MSN are doing now for their members. Netvibes has grown in popularity tremendously in the past year by taking advantage of RSS and simple widgets to aggregate information and search the web.

4) Bloglines - Probably the oldest RSS reader that’s going to be in this review, Bloglines has enjoyed a pretty good run of success in the past few years. The only problem is that it’s suffering from what a lot of successful companies suffer from - complacency! Until they realize that they need to innovate instead of spectate, Bloglines will continue to watch others pass them by.

Stand-Alone Readers
1) GreatNews - This one I actually found on my own and to my surprise, it’s suppose to be a very popular RSS reader in Asia. I took it for a spin via my Parallels and it ran very well. For you windows users out there, it’s very well organized and is rich in features. Also, if you’re an old school Bloglines user, it integrates Blogines into the Software to make importing your RSS Feeds even easier.

2) NetNewsWire - This is for my Mac Users as this is one of the most popular RSS Readers for Apple users only. Mark Shead of Productivity501.com reminded me of it as I was compiling this list. A downside to this Reader is that it actually does cost money to have the full version, so when I tried it out, I don’t know if it’s worth the money.

3) Vienna - This is the RSS reader that I personally use. It’s a reader that has safari built into the program, so you can open up links within the program in case you want to comment on someone’s blog. The only problem i have with it is that the high frequency at which it can refresh is 30 minutes. I don’t like waiting that long for anything, so that’s really my biggest gripe.

Remember, by using RSS Readers, you will be cutting down on a lot of time wasted waiting for your favorite websites to load or by visiting them to only find that they haven’t updated their sites since the last time you visited.

Oh . . . and don’t forget me to add me to your RSS reader once you’ve chosen the right RSS Reader for you!

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