It's been a few years since we last checked in on RSS reader Newzie. And it turns out the developers weren't sitting on their behinds for the past three years. Because the latest version of this free RSS reader for Windows is even cooler.

First up, Newzie has all the same basic features we loved, including color coded indicators that let you know at a glance how new an item is. But it also has one awesome new feature: the ability to monitor pages without RSS feeds. Just click the add button, select webpage, and then decide what kind of changes you want to monitor. You can get alerts when a certain keyword pops up on a page, when new images are uploaded, or when anything at all changes.

You can also create several different types of custom channels. For example, if you subscribe to several similar RSS feeds that don't publish posts very often, you can combine them into a single "bulk" feed. Or you can create a "word watchdog" feed that monitors all of your feeds for certain keywords and creates a single feed displaying articles from any other feeds that mention that keyword.

[via gHacks]

Sure, most RSS readers give you a few button that lets you share interesting stories you're reading with friends, loved ones, and enemies via email or a link blog. But what if you want to broadcast a story to your Twitter friends, or send a story by instant messenger? Apprise is an RSS reader designed to save you the few seconds it would take to copy and paste the link.

Apprise lets you sign into your AOL IM or Twitter account and send a page to your contacts with the click of a button. The reader is built on Adobe AIR, which means it should work on Windows, Linux, or OS X. But it's worth noting that Apprise is available as a public beta at the moment, which means you might experience some bugs. After importing a few hundred feeds, I found that Apprise crashed every few minutes. The Linux version is described as an alpha.

Aside from the Twitter and AIM integration, Apprise has a few other tricks up its sleeve. For example, you can view the full web version of any feed item. You can search your feeds, and you can import and export OPML files. One things you cannot do? Email a story to a friend.

[via Sizlopedia]

Remember back when the only software worth having was the kind that fit on a single floppy disk? NFReader would have fit right in. You know, if RSS and floppy disks had coexisted a bit longer. NFReader is an RSS reader for Windows that weighs in at less than 1MB. It also doesn't require installation, which makes it a perfect candidate for throwing on a USB flash drive.

You won't find a ton of features in NFReader. There's no way to tag, star, or share items. You can just mark articles as read or unread. But you do to choose whether you want to use HTML or just read the plain text versions of each article.

Like any good RSS Reader, NFReader will let you import or export OPML files. So if you typically use an online RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, but want to test out a desktop reader, you can export your web-based feed list and import it in a matter of moments.

[via Lux.Et.Umbra]

Eluma has released a public beta version of its social RSS reader for Windows, which has been in private beta for the last few months. Eluma is basically a desktop application that lets you sift through RSS feeds and bookmarks.

You can also rate individual items with a thumbs up or down button or tag items to make them easier to find later, or share them online with other Eluma users. There are also browser toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer that let you add web pages or RSS feeds to Eluma with a single click.

The public version of Eluma has a few new features, including:

• New local search feature for searching local data
• Improved navigation of public web collections
• Improved interface with new menus and desktop alert options
• Support for Firefox 3 and 64 bit versions of Windows

if you're a fan of desktop RSS readers, Eluma might be worth checking out. One complaint we have is that here doesn't appear to be a way to view all of your unread items in a "river of news" format.

Note to anyone developing an RSS reader: If you don't support OPML, we're not interested. While adding feeds for your favorite web sites one at a time might have sound like fun, once you've got more than 10 feeds, the charm of entering them by hand kind of wears off. And over the last few years, we've accumulated just a few more feeds than that. So when we first heard about new kid on the RSS reader block Shyftr a few months ago, we pretty much ignored the site. But now that Shyftr has added OPML support, we decided to upload our 465 feeds and take it for a spin.

What sets Shyftr apart from RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines is the service's social aspects. Users can leave comments on items they read, and those comments can be seen by any other Shyftr users who subscribe to the same feed. Shyftr got a bit of bad press last month when the company tried to add comments from the original article page to Shyftr, and eventually decided to remove this feature. The issue might not have been as controversial if comments left on Shyftr were automatically added to the original page, thus alleviating allegations that Shyftr was trying to move the discussion away from the blog itself and into the Shyftr community. But there are some technical challenges associated with doing that, not the least of which is that there are a number of different protocols that blogs use for posting comments.

Like any good social network, Shyftr lets you become "friends" with other users, view their profiles and activity, and invite friends who haven't already signed up for the free service.

One thing to note is that while Shyftr now has an OPML import feature, it's slow. It only takes a few moments to import a few hundred feeds. But it takes much, much longer to "process" those feeds. And if they don't process correctly they won't show up in your feed reader. So if you've got more than a few hundred feeds, you might want to hit the import button right before heading out for your lunch break. Maybe it'll be done by the time you get back. But if you leave the page during the process, you'll have to start all over again.

[via Louis Gray]

Have you ever found yourself reading an item in your RSS reader, only to think, "wow, I should really write about this on my blog?" Well if the reason you didn't follow through is because you were too lazy to open up a second application or web site, YeahReader can help. It's a feed reader and blog client all wrapped up in one.

Neither the feed reader nor the blog client are anything to write home about. You can import OPML files, arrange feeds by category. And you can post entries to your LiveJournal, Blogger, or any application that uses the MetaWeblog API, including WordPress.

The cool part is the way the feed reader and the blog client work together. In addition to the usual feed reader tools that let you mark items as read or unread, you can also click a "blog this" button to copy feed items into the blog client. Just be careful to use this power for good and not evil. In other words, if you're going to say, write about an article you found on Download Squad, please don't copy the whole article and pass it off as your own work. That's what we like to call copyright infringement. On the other hand, you can use YeahReader to copy quotations and other tidbits to your clipboard while writing up your 100% original content inspired by an item you found on another site.

[via AppScout]

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]

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