Blog Yellek

Continuing my series of reviews on RSS aggregators (see my review of Bloglines and my article on why RSS matters for more) I now turn to NewsGator Online. NewsGator has a number of offerings in the RSS area but the service I am reviewing today is NewsGator Online, the free web edition of their RSS aggregator.

Setting up is as simple as importing your OPML file from any other aggregator or adding feeds one by one using the Add Feeds link. As with many commercial aggregators NewsGator will automatically add a few of it’s own feeds including news about the service and their editors choice feed. Feeds can be sorted into folders for ease of reference.

You can set feeds to be marked as read when viewed (like bloglines) or you can mark each item read manually (the default). Feed items that you want to keep for later can be saved to a special clippings feed which never deletes the items. I use this to store webshots pictures that I want to save for later.

Feed reading is fairly standard with each item listed in a newspaper style for whatever feed or folder you have selected. Unlike other services (Bloglines, News Alloy) you don’t have any keyboard shortcuts to move to the next item etc. This reflects a very web 1.0 type of interface where just about everything requires a full page refresh giving the whole interface a fairly slow and unresponsive feel to it. There appears to be a lot of traffic going to Google analytics also which slows things down still further.

One unique feature (which I have to say I’ve never used) is the ability to rate each feed item as you are reading by means of using a nifty web 2.0 star rating widget at the bottom of each feed. Given that there seem to be no community linking features on NewsGator I can’t see the use of it but it works nonetheless.

On the site as a whole there is quite a bit of advertising for NewsGator’s other products which does get annoying at times.

NewsGator has never lost an item in any feed the whole time I was using it.

All in all NewwsGator is a solid if uninspiring choice as an RSS aggregator. It has the basic features that you need but it is let down by a slightly clunky interface.