There also appears to be a bit of lag when you scroll to the bottom to reach older stories, which takes a second or two to re-populate your feed. A "save to Instapaper" feature is said to be on the horizon, potentially making for a devasting one-two punch. It should also be noted that Betaworks, the company that owns Digg, recently purchased Instapaper, too. It's a nice, non-invasive social element that doesn't whack you in the head with its inherent #social #media-ness, and gives you a good idea of what articles are floating to the top on a given day. I'm always tinkering with lists, which is why I appreciate that Digg Reader lets you organize feeds in the left-hand module directly with drag-and-drop - a feature the other two readers sorely lack.Īlso big: The Popular tab, which signals what other people on the internet are reading. There aren't many bells and whistles there is, however, plenty of white space (perhaps too much in Expanded view) and a few nifty additives that even Google Reader didn't have. You only get two view options: List (basically just the headlines a la Google Reader), and Expanded, which shows you the headline, story art, and an intro paragraph. Of all the potential Google Reader replacements, Digg's offering is the most stripped down and the most elegant. If a wide variety of customizable features is your thing, Aol Reader is your Google Reader replacement. I don't feel like that's enough context to make an RSS reader particularly useful. It makes for a lot of needless clicking around.Īnd finally, the scraping technology Aol Reader uses often grabs just a sentence. To get to your organizer page, you have to navigate through the settings button to the specified tab. You also can't organize or delete feeds directly in the left-hand column. There isn't a "no" option - you can only skip the question, and it prompts you with the same annoying query. This can also make the reader feel clunky and slow at times - but we're talking about milliseconds.Īnother minor gripe is that if you sign in using Facebook, Aol Reader will repeatedly ask you if it can post to your Facebook News Feed on your behalf before you sign in. Its interface is more cluttered than the other readers, but that's the trade-off for more options. You can tailor everything from font size, light-and-dark layouts, how your unread stories show up, and more.
(I didn't really need them, however.)Īnd hoo boy - can you customize things.
These tags show up at the bottom of your left-hand column, and could be useful to power RSS users. (Digg Reader has this, too.)Īol Reader gives users the ability to assign multiple tags to a story, kind of like Evernote.
#RSSOWL VS FEEDLY FULL#
You can switch between List View (just headlines listed chronologically like Google Reader), Card View (headlines and art arranged into a Pinterest-like grid), Full View (with a paragraph-long intro), and Pane View (which functions like an email interface, with stories on the left, content on the right).Īnd if clicking around with a mouse to navigate feels Philistine, there are keyboard shortcuts power users can employ to zip through stories. The first thing you'll notice is that Aol Reader's layout is big on customization. Nobody in their right mind really expected Aol to rush into the RSS fray, but the company has done a solid job of building a perfectly competent reader that former Google Reader users can jump into, no instructions necessary.Īfter creating an Aol account (LOL), or signing in with a Twitter, Google, or Facebook account (more on that in a second), users can port in their reading list from Google Reader and begin perusing blogs like it's 2009 again. Instead, consider it a rough assessment of what each service offers right now, how they differ, and which one might work for you and your particular set of daily-reading needs. (That is, pecking around on the internet for interesting stories to write about.) This isn't an official review of each reader, since the products are more or less still in beta. I spent the past two weeks using three new RSS readers: Aol Reader, Digg Reader, and Feedly, using each exclusively for a few days in my natural workflow. Now, as we send Reader off to join Buzz in the great Google graveyard, we have a number of worthy RSS upstarts vying for a bookmark in your browser.
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