Entrepreneur
Article

7 Web-Based RSS Readers and News Aggregators for Staying in the Loop

By Alyssa Gregory

I love my RSS feeds, all 134 of them. To accommodate my feed-reading addiction, I like to try out different readers to change up the format and explore new ways to keep on top of the information I like to track.

Lately, my exploration has revolved around web-based RSS feed readers, and all-in-one start pages that focus on keyword and topic-based searches. Here are a few of both that are worth a look.

Bloglines

Bloglines is a web-based feed reader and management system for subscribing, reading and sharing. You can make your own personalized news page, including articles, blogs, images and audio. It’s available in 10 languages and there’s also a mobile version.
bloglines

Feedly

Feedly is a Firefox add-on that organizes your feeds in a magazine-like start page. It integrates with Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube and Amazon. Feedly also allows you to configure multiple views, filter content and easily share articles with others.

feedly

FeedShow

FeedShow is a fast online RSS feed reader (in beta) that lets you import/export feed lists, create categories, save items locally, and convert to PDF format.

feedshow

Google Reader

Google Reader is arguably the most popular web-based feed reader out there. The service constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content and then auto-updates. You can easily share and recommend articles by creating a public page, and even by adding a customizable clip to your own website that displays your latest shared items in your site’s sidebar.

google reader

Guzzle.it

Guzzle.it is a topic-based single-page news aggregator that not only monitors specific feeds, but also scans the Internet for keywords and topics you want to keep track of. To use it, you just add a new topic on your page, and Guzzle instantly searches online data to get results.

guzzle

NetVibes

Netvibes is a web site that lets you personalize your web experience by collecting information that’s important to you, including newspapers, blogs, weather, email, search, videos, photos, social networks, podcasts, widgets, games and more. Your personalized Dashboard automatically updates, allowing you to keep track of news, social media sites and other data.
netvibes

Pageflakes

Pageflakes is a social personalized homepage that lets you customize a page with small, movable versions of all of your web favorites. You can share your page as a “Pagecast” with a private group or with the world, and there are thousands of widgets available.

pageflakes

How do you keep up with your feeds? Do you use a web-based reader or personalized start page?

  • thanks for the list, I’ll definitely try them out. I’ve been trying to avoid using google for all my needs, so I’ve replaced google reader with NetVibes, but it doesn’t allow to search through subscriptions, so I’m using FeedDemon, a desktop based app.
    I’d like to use a web based app which can import from Google Reader and has a good search functionality.

  • I’ve stayed with Netvibes over the years and they continue to improve and stay ahead of the game in my opinion.

    I personally prefer the widgets view (like your screenshot), but you can easily switch to something more akin to Google Reader if you prefer that. As much as I appreciate the quality of Google apps, I try not to have all my data with one company, and as Netvibes seems more innovative as well I am very happy there.

  • Shameless self promotion:
    I also suggest Feedingo http://feedingo.com . It’s a new online based Feed Reader that has a nice clean layout and some great features.

  • joeworkman

    You guy totally left out http://feedafever.com. It ROCKS!

  • not registered with sitepoint

    I’m liking the discovery and delivery approach found in iCurrent.com

    For me, it’s the least overhead and keeps me the most informed.

    The biggie here is that I have topics, issues, locations, trends, people that I follow (not just sources) and I don’t know ahead of publishing which source is going to write on those topics and I don’t want to see a bunch of duplicate stories and I like that I can depend on iCurrent to have done the work of prioritizing and managing the stream for me in a clean easy to grok/drill layout.

  • anonymously

    It would of been nice to see a feature comparison matrix of the above.

  • I know it’s not web based, but I really enjoy the Sage Firefox extension .

  • FormerGenius

    Thanks for this list. Lately I’ve realised that my feed and news subscriptions have become totally disorganised. Your post will help to rectify this. I’m going to give Netvibes a try.

  • Bitmesh

    The beta version of the new Bloglines is way better than the old one. Check it out at http://beta.bloglines.com

  • kosmofilo

    I’ve been using Planetaki for a long time. It’s a single page aggregator with minimalistic, readable designs.

  • Snapey

    I’ve been a long time user of Netvibes. I don’t know how they stay afloat without any ad revenue

  • Emanuel

    That first paragraph summed me up a few months ago when I got tired of visiting site after site in my ever-increasing list of bookmarks. I settled on a Firefox extension called Brief as my RSS reader.
    The web ones look OK, so I may at least give their sites a visit, but I was more interested when you mentioned Feedly, another FF extension. It definitely looks pretty, so I’ll give that a try.

  • SonOfABeach

    It’s a bit buggy and it has lost my feeds once or twice, but I still like Alert Bear (http://www.alertbear.com) because it “bubbles up” in the corner of my desktop any new feed posts. Plus it has “bear” in the name.

  • fred_bilson

    I like the suggested readers for generic reading. I mainly read business and techie news. I like http://socialnews.biz because it comes all setup and curates everything for you. Saves me a lot of time.

Recommended
Sponsors
Get the latest in Entrepreneur, once a week, for free.
https://www.sitepoint.com/rss-readers-news-aggregators/
www.sitepoint.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-13
176961
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2HFTM2DZMBKXJPMU4EOZQAXKHRMPZ7W2
<urn:uuid:3bf5113c-87f1-4e42-b89f-c04278b0e4c4>
2017-03-29T02:23:53Z
54.148.84.95
sha1:FXTPZIQKDZN5W7U2EXZLNELJPNM77DSY
<urn:uuid:c81da1c9-6601-40b5-b4dc-926283eabbcd>
https://www.sitepoint.com/rss-readers-news-aggregators/
length
response
<urn:uuid:ab0ff8a1-7540-4105-beae-69718bf933cf>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-233-31-227.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-13
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf