RSS Home Page
Lately, I’ve been unhappy with my start page. I use(d) ProtoPage which is a website that aggregates RSS feeds. Why go to a single page of news when you can get 15 news papers/webpages into one page? A few weeks ago, they changed the way it worked. No Beta phase, nada!
So last night, I played with 4 others: netvibes, Google/ig, Pageflakes and my.Yahoo!. I used each of them for 15 minutes and netvibes came out as the clear winner. The only issue with netvibes is that its a little slow as it opens the feeds after the page loads. The others appeared to have cached them.
I am able to put all of my buddies blogfeeds on all of them. Google/ig and Netvibes appears to have the most gadgets and tools. Netvibe also has the most elegant design. my.Yahoo!’s was so old style, albeit AJAXed to the hilt. Google/ig’s was rubbish, they really need to hire a really good webdesign firm to refresh their look.
Pageloads wise Google/ig was fastest, then Pageflakes then my.Yahoo! with about the same amount of content. myYahoo! was the most difficult to configure as it tries to “force” you to use its pre-selected feeds.
In Summary, if you’re tired of spending 30 minutes a day, surfing the site you love, just get an RSS reader homesite and put them all in one (or two or three) tabs. netvibes is real good at counting the new feeds items and puts them in little parenthesis in the tab bars.