For me, the discovery of the RSS Feed was the single most brave achievement of 2005. The readers gave me an opportunity to compile several chunks of good information from the feeds at one place. I first began by using Newsgator because of it’s online capabilities and I was quite happy with it. Later I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird (yes you heard that right) which is also an excellent RSS reader. it also allows categarization in folders so I can have all my Apple Macintosh related feeds sitting pretty in a folder by the same name. Thunderbird was by far the most loved one but it required installation and wasn’t available online. Not that I travel much but it’s helpful if I can check the same feeds from home as well. But if you are looking for an installable reader, switch to Thunderbird.
Here comes Google Reader. It allows me to import all the RSS feeds in OPML format which I can easily export from within Thunderbird. Instead of the folders we have labels in Google Reader, much the same like Gmail. You only require a Gmail ID to use the Google Reader which I am sure most of us have by now. The brightest improvement from the other readers is the clean GUI of Google Reader which never distracts you from doing your tasks.
The application however doesn’t allow multiple labeling of several feeds at one go. This is very tiring in case you have hundreds of subscriptions. Moreover it also doesn’t allow editing the label titles if we have typed something erroneously. In any case this is a Beta version and things will improve in the coming days. If you haven’t discovered RSS Feeds in 2005, there’s still a week left. Here’s your last chance to do it now :-)
