This blog's parent company, AOL, has launched a new myAOL portal. The site includes three new services:

• myPage: a personalized start page
• Favorites: an updated feed reader
• Mgnet (pronounced "magnet"), a customizable news page that selects news for you based on your reading preferences

The feed reader feels a lot like a cramped version of Google Reader, but with a nifty new "mix and share" feature that lets you share a group of feeds with others. The personalized start page looks pretty much like every other AJAX start page you've seen in the last year or two. But Mgnet is pretty cool, if not 100% original. You have to use it to really get a sense of it, so we whipped up a little screencast showing Mgnet and the other services fit together. It's available after the jump.

We woke up this morning thinking it was a slow news day. It turns out there's plenty of news going on in the world -- it's just that Google Reader hasn't been keeping up with all of our favorite RSS feeds.

Sometime around 11:00 last night, Google Reader stopped updating feeds. The online RSS reader started working again at about 9:00 this morning. A Google representative wrote in the user forums that the service should catch up on all your feeds over the next few hours.

If you're someone who relies on RSS feeds for your news every day, this highlights one of the problems with depending on a single online service. With all the talk about online applications replacing offline programs, and even web-based "operating systems," it's good to have a reminder that even a company with Google's resources can have service outages.

Make sure to bookmark some of your favorite pages. Or better yet, set up a desktop-based RSS reader like FeedDemon or RSSOwl as a backup.

[via TechCrunch]

These days it seems like the whole world has shifted over to web-based RSS aggregators like Google Reader and Bloglines. If you're a holdout and prefer to use a Windows desktop application reader, you might be pleased to note that NewsGator's FeedDemon has recently had an update to version 2.5. FeedDemon is widely accepted as the best Windows-based offline reader, and the only reason that it doesn't kill the competition is that it is a commercial product, whereas it is competing against a host of free alternatives.

Anyhow, there are a lot of people that use FeedDemon and those users can now take advantage of the new features that have been added to it, like better support for offline reading and a very well conceptualized Popular Topics report.

The new offline reading functionality gives users the ability to prefetch unread items, which will store not only all images in unread posts, but a configurable number of linked pages. While this process can take awhile, it gives you what is essentially a full-featured feed reading and browsing experience while offline. Good stuff.

The new Popular Topics page lets you see at a glance which topics are being linked to and commented upon often amongst the feeds that you are subscribed to, with a callout that shows what is most popular amongst all of NewsGator Online's users. Great stuff.

For similar functionality on a Mac, check out NetNewsWire, also owned by NewsGator.

FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are undoubtedly top-notch products, and ones that we have used regularly in the past. Unfortunately, they may be some of the best and last in a dying breed of software; with the recent addition of offline browsing functionality to Google Reader, there is one less reason not to simply consume your feeds in a browser. Working in a browser for feed reading adds the advantage of not needing to switch contexts from feed reader to browser, or work with an under-powered built-in browser in an offline reader. Since you're dealing with web content, what better place to do so than in a browser?

Feed reading might be a little time intensive for some busy bodies. Open an application or web location, read, and repeat. How about making it a little easier? Anothr is trying its best to speed feed reading up. We covered them back in October with the release of their RSS aggregator for Skype, and now they enter the market with a reader for users of Google Talk and Jabber clients.

To get Anothr up and running, add the contact name "anothr@gmail.com" to your friends list in Google Talk. The Anothr RSS alert bot will send you back an IM with links to manage and share subscriptions. You can enter website links, or upload OPML files to import sites and get the news ball rolling. However, this solution might only be good for a few important news feeds. I couldn't imagine getting bombarded with a feed update every 2 seconds.

If you are looking for a simple way to read your news feeds, this could be for you. It could be an annoying way to receive updates to your favorite news, but if you want to be notified immediately of updates, this is a great way.

Blackberry and Java-enabled cellphone users can now use NewsGator Go!, the mobile version of NewsGator's RSS feed reading software. Up until now, the NewsGator Go! was only available for Windows Mobile devices.

While web-based NewsGator accounts are free, NewsGator Go! will set you back $30. But the program has a few nice features, including the ability to synchronize with your online account, the ability to email stories from your cellphone, and one-handed navigation.

While mobile web browsers are getting more and more powerful, few can handle web-based feed readers like NewsGator. And so while it would be nice to be able to surf to your free web-based account using a Blackberry, it might be worth paying for a version optimized for small screens and slower processors. Not sure it's worth paying $30 for, but definitely worth something.

There's a free trial available.

[via MobileCrunch]

Alien6 recently released a new RSS reader for Windows Mobile, and it looks like a great little news reader for people who prefer the look and feel of a newspaper to RSS feeds. But here at DownloadSquad, we're RSS junkies, and it's hard to beat a good RSS reader for sifting through piles of information every day.

And lucky for you, while there are some great commercial feed readers for Windows Mobile, including Alien's A6 Times and Illium Software's NewBreak, there are a number of free programs that perform almost as well.

I started using Google Reader a few months ago, largely because it's fast, customizable, and lets me combine all of my feeds into a "river of news." In other words, I can read my news based on when it came in rather than what source it came from.

But up until I switched to Google Reader, I was a pretty big fan of NewsGator. It's got a clean look and feel, it's easy to use, and has podcasting support. But it was slow.

NewsGator has released a new beta version that makes use of AJAX to speed things up a bit. For example, when you click on the settings tabs in Newsgator Classic, you're directed to a new page. In Newsgator Beta a window pops up on your screen and disappears when you click close.

The page doesn't need to refresh every time you switch feeds or mark items read. But Newsgator still takes longer to load feeds than Google Reader. And I've grown rather fond of my river of news.

Otherwise, the new beta looks and behaves remarkably like Newsgator Classic. While this is great if you've been using Newsgator for a while, it doesn't seem to offer many new compelling features that would convince me to switch back.

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.

I've had an invitation to FeedLounge in my Inbox since July, and now I'm never going to get to use it. FeedLounge is yet another web-based feed reader service, but has gotten pretty stellar reviews, and has just opened up to the public. It has the requisite AJAXy interface ("you may quickly forget that you’re using a web application"), a full set of keyboard shortcuts, three different views (Outlook-style, three-column, or river of news), color-coded tagging and flagging, OPML import and export, 401 authentication, and more. One thing you'll find in FeedLounge that you won't in most other services, though, is a price tag: FeedLounge costs $5/month or $50/year. You can try a three-hour demo, but they only let 50 people on at a time, and the waiting list is pretty long.

In the not especially surprising news department, Redmondmag.com is reporting that Microsoft is planning to include an RSS aggregator in Outlook 12, to be released with Vista in the second half of this year. This is bad news for the likes of NewsGator who sell plugins that give Outlook feed capability. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft will reconcile the inclusion of feed support in both Outlook and Internet Explorer.