It's been a while since we've seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Start Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an amazing variety of start pages to choose from, we've never found any of them to be particularly compelling.

Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a start page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It's actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.

Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we can offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.

Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it's also dangerous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.

But once it's all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven't been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that's certainly something.

Monday Google unveiled yet another beta site. Google Reader is now formatted for the iPhone. iPhone users tired of pinching and stretching and tapping text only links in the normal version of Reader or dealing with the plain Classic mobile version of Reader can head over to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to check out the new beta site.

With the iPhone-enabled web-app, Google joins Ask.com in the web-based RSS reader marketplace. Ask.com's Bloglines has had an iPhone version available to users since July 19, 2007. iBloglines was created with less than a 1000 lines of code on a lark by an internal developer who bought an iPhone and wanted better access to the site.

Web-based RSS reader Bloglines has rolled out three new features, two of which continue to blur the boundary between RSS readers and the rest of the web. The first update is a new "save" button that lets you set aside articles for future reference. This is different than the existing "pin" button because "save" lets you add a comment to a post and send it to a folder for archival purposes.

The second update lets you use a Photo Widget to view large thumbnails from Flickr feeds, giving you one less reason to click away from your RSS reader. Honestly, once you've got a good list of feeds, you can easily spend hours "surfing the web," without ever leaving Google Reader or Bloglines. But sometimes you need to see an article the way it looks on its original website, and that brings us to the third update.

Bloglines has aded a new "preview" option to the 3-pane view. This will essentially load a complete website inside of Bloglines, letting you view a blog post in context, complete with embedded videos, images, and advertisements.

In order to access the new features, you'll need to login to the beta version of Bloglines.

[via Mashable]

Bloglines is announcing several updates to its web-based RSS reader today. The service now supports OpenID, meaning you can login to Bloglines using the same secure information you use to login to other sites. The company says this is just the first step in supporting a more open platform for Bloglines.

There's also a new mobile version of Bloglines Beta with new features including improved browser support, a start page listed at the top of the screen, and the ability to "pin" items that you want to come back to later.

There are also some new personalization features under the settings tab in the full version of Bloglines. For example, you can set viewing preferences for individual feeds. If you always like to read some feeds in full view and others in list view, there's no more need to flip back and forth, back and forth.

Feed Each Other is a new social RSS reader. What does that mean? Well, it's kind of a social network and RSS reader all rolled into one, sort of like a cross between Google Reader and Facebook.

As an RSS reader, the layout should be pretty familiar to anyone who uses Bloglines, NewsGator, Google Reader, or any of the other popular web-based RSS readers. You can organize your feeds into folders and you can choose to view just headlines or full articles. Feed Each Other also has a pretty good site discovery feature. Type "Download Squad" into the search box, and our feed will come up right away.

But the social aspects are what really make Feed Each Other shine. When you view our feed, you'll see a list of popular feeds show up in the bottom left corner. These are feeds that users who like Download Squad have subscribed to. You can also view profiles of individual users who have subscribed to Download Squad on the upper right hand side just above our feed's content. You can click on a user profile and see what they're reading. If you like their taste in news, you can add them as a contact.

You can also share interesting articles from your feeds with other users. While Google Reader publishes your shared clips as a sort of standalone link blog, Feed Each Other lets your contacts see your shared items when they login. You can also leave comments on your shared items or others to see and respond to.

Feed Each Other has just emerged from an invitation-only beta, so while it's pretty robust, there are still a few kinks to work out. But the service definitely shows promise.

[via Read/WriteWeb

Bloglines has just packed a bunch of new features into its online news feed searching, subscribing to and reading service, and it all begins with a start page.

Bloglines headlines its new feature developments with a personalized start page. This is the page that brings everything together in a quick and easy view with an AJAX interface. There is nothing like starting feed reading off with a view like this to help you distinguish and gravitate towards your top interests first, before they get lost in a sea of unread material. Users can also now drag and drop feeds to add them into a three panel interface. To make things even easier, Bloglines has integrated mouse over previews to get a quick snippet of the content for a more in depth look at the article. Two other views are also available to complement the three panel view, a full view, and quick view mode. The quick view lists out titles for an easy news scan, with the full view listing out full article content.

This new redevelopment comes more than two years after the Bloglines acquisition by IAC interactive, the company that owns the popular ASK search engine. It can be accessed at http://beta.bloglines.com.

Bloglines has just pushed out an update that adds a tab to its interface called Playlists. Here's how they describe Playlists:

Playlists lets you create short groupings of feeds to access from your main list. Create as many as you like, and use them to personalize your Bloglines experience that much more. Create them, change them, even delete them--all without changing your original "tree" of feeds. What song playlists are to your MP3 library, Bloglines Playlists are to your Bloglines blogs & feeds.

I'm not certain that I understand the need for yet another level of organization to my feed list, particularly when I feel overwhelmed with attempting to keep the main list in order. I suppose for people that maintain thousands of feeds, most of which they rarely visit, this could be a useful way to keep an eye on lesser-visited feeds.

Text Link Ads is providing an interesting utility that will allow you to index your blog's importance in some specific categories versus other blogs in the same space, called the Blog Juice Calculator. You can also compare your site's relative importance to the top performers. For example, Download Squad gets a very respectable 8.4 in the Computers / Technology category, which puts us about tied with Robert Scoble's blog, and slightly trailing the likes of TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and of course Engadget.

Google Juice is currently calculated based on information from Technorati, Alexa, Bloglines and Links - it's not clear where the Links metric comes from. Of course, knowing that Alexa numbers can be very skewed considering that they're based on statistics gathered by an Internet Explorer toolbar, it's probably not reasonable to consider the Blog Juice Calculator to be the final word in terms of ranking blogs. In fact, Technorati is probably the most widely accepted authority in that regard. But it's fun to play with, and you get this cool little badge for your site, if you happen to get a ranking that you're not too embarrassed to publicize.

Today's release of FeedDemon 2.1 beta seemed like a nice little treat. After the release of NewsGator Go! last week, it felt like a really solid one-two punch from NewsGator. Right on!

But then as I'm using the new version of FeedDemon, I find updates notifying me of minor (but pretty wonderful from a usability perspective) updates to Bloglines, and the Google Reader update that David already walked us through. Holy cow! Since we already know what's up with Google Reader, let's go back and have a look at the updates to Bloglines and FeedDemon.

Bloglines
Bloglines have given a very nice overhaul to the feed list on the left hand side, adding some carefully done Ajaxy goodness, like yellow fades for unread count updates. There is also a subtle notification of the number of new unread items as you obsessively press the R hotkey to refresh your sidebar. Feed list updates occur more often. All in all Bloglines feels snappier than before, although that could just be the excitement of new features talking.

FeedDemon
FeedDemon's update is also on the subtle but usable side, including a big security update to prevent malicious code inserted into an RSS feed from being executed. An additional feature has also been announced, which is called Popular Topics. FeedDemon can scour all of your subscriptions to see if there are any common threads linking them together. If so, it presents them in a custom view showing you items that are of enough interest that multiple people are talking about them. Be forewarned, though, you need to be subscribed to a fairly substantial number of feeds for this feature to be of much use. FeedDemon also feels a bit snappier, although no reference to specific performance updates were given in the release notes. If you're a FeedDemon user, I'd suggest getting involved in helping test the latest release. Nick's software is always so polished that even a beta version is very usable.

So what's the deal - everyone picked the same day to release new features? Although with the release of NewsGator Go! and the ability to take my feeds offline in my Pocket PC, I thought I'd finally settled on a platform, I now have more playing around to do with Bloglines (it's just more fun to use now), and Google Reader, the dark horse. The Google Reader update really came out of left field, but I can't wait to explore it since their first take at a feed reader was, well, weird. Looks like they've cleaned up their act.

While we're on the subject of mobile RSS readers... Bloglines announced yesterday that its Bloglines Mobile service now features integrated Skweezer technology.

What's Skweezer, you ask? Well, on its own, it's a free, platform-independent web service that optimizes page content for mobile devices. The benefit of Skweezer technology being added to Bloglines is that you won't have to specifically go to the Skweezer portal when you want to force a particular site to be friendly to your mobile device. When you visit a page via Bloglines Mobile, Skweezer compresses and reformats the content on the fly. Bonus: Skweezer can also translate content into more than a dozen languages.

I need a new RSS reader. I am kinda picky, hard to please, and a power user / administrator. Anyone out there know of an RSS reader, whether by download or on the web, that you consider to be the RSS killer app out there? I have tried a bunch of them, bloglines (not intuitive enough), NewsGator (not intuitive enough but the one I use right now), feedreader (not bad but lists all text, not actual web pages from links), Wizz RSS plugin for firefox (not bad, but is way too hard to use), Rojo (adds feed I don't want), Google Reader (too cumbersome), etc. Even if you use the ones I just listed, please enlighten me as to which one you can't live without and why. Are there others worth trying? Usually on download squad we bring you all the newest, latest, and greatest. Now it's your turn. Tell me why you love the RSS reader you use and why it's the best. I may just end up finding a new one to use. Ready, set, go!

Bloglines, the immensely popular web-based feed reader owned by Ask.com, launched its long-awaited blog search engine yesterday. The search can be accessed from both the Bloglines and Ask.com web sites, with slightly different interfaces. Bloglines' search adds a "+" button next to each search result that lets you preview posts in their entirety and a "more info" link that shows a cute pop-up with the feed's number of Bloglines subscribers and any citations for the post. Both search pages have a few advanced options, including filtering by date, sorting by date, relevance, or popularity, and including or excluding news. It also has the obvious (but welcome) integration with Bloglines, allowing you to subscribe to feeds (the Ask.com version also lets you subscribe with Google Reader, NewsGator, or My Yahoo!), "clip" posts, and post them to del.icio.us, Digg, or Newsvine. Not bad.

[Thanks, Andreas!]