Top Three Web RSS Readers to Manage Your RSS Feeds

The Internet is quickly becoming many people’s one-stop shop for getting information. There are tons of newspapers, magazines, podcasts, blogs, etc. talking about something that will be of interest to a group of people.These publications usually offer RSS feeds that make it easy for their readers to continue viewing their content outside of their site. If you have more than ten RSS feeds that you read every day, you probably use (or need) a RSS Reader to manage them. These RSS Readers can be web-only or downloadable software.

Below are the top three web RSS Readers that you can use to manage your RSS feeds:

1. Google Reader

Google Reader provides its users with a simple interface that gives them a lot of options to manage their RSS feeds. You are able to sort feeds into folders and tag the feeds’ content. Google Reader provides a variety of ways to share feeds:
1. Email the information to different recipients, or
2. Share it on your personalized, public Google Reader page.

Google Reader also gives you the capability of connecting with your friends and seeing their shared items. If there is a particular item that you want to bookmark to read later, but don’t want to share it, Google Reader allows you to star it. Recommendations are given according to the feeds that you subscribe to. Overall, it’s a robust and easy RSS Reader that can be read from any computer or mobile phone.

2. Feedly

Feedly is a Firefox-only add-on that builds on top of Google Reader. It interfaces with Twitter and FriendFeed, so you are able to keep up with the conversations on the two sites as well. Like Google Reader, you are able to see your friends’ shared items, star items to read later, and hide the items you have already read.

One of the best things about Feedly is that gives you three ways to view your feeds: Cover, Digest, and Latest. Cover gives summary view of all your feeds, tweets, visuals, etc. Digest is more of a detailed view. Latest provides a chronological view of all your feeds, starting from the most recent. It provides a prettier view of Google Reader, but it doesn’t give the flexibility of using your browser of choice.

3. Bloglines

Bloglines is a web-based RSS feeder that currently has two versions – Classic and Beta. The beta version provides you with the capability of customizing your own front page. Additionally, it allows you to drag-n-drop feeds into this page. You can choose to “mark as read” individual posts or the entire folder, which is the only option in the classic. Bloglines can be accessible via mobile phones, and it provides you with the capability of customizing your personalized mobile site. It also works with OpenID technology, which means you can quickly login with your OpenID and bypass the troublesome process of registering a username.

As with the other two readers, you are able to save and email individual content. The drag-n-drop function, modifying the front page and mobile site, and OpenID settings are pretty nice. However, it’s missing the sharing functionality within the reader, like the other two readers support.

Which Web RSS Reader do you use?  What would you say is the best functionality of it?  Regardless of your RSS reader of choice, if you read numerous RSS feeds, you need one. It provides a great way to organize and maintain your feeds, and relieve some of the stress of having to sift through all of them.

Tags: bloglines, feedly, google reader, RSS, rss reader