No two RSS Aggregators are the same. Features that seem core in one aggregator are far down on the feature list for another. It’s hard to make a choice. Enter AggCompare.com. It’s only a few hours old and I still have a lot of plans for it, but it’s ready to start storing the data. Please head over there and enter a profile of your favorite Aggregator.
If you have any feature requests or if you think it’s missing some important criteria, let me know in the comments section of this post.
Update: Praneet(in the comments) is right, of course. I need to put descriptions on each of the criteria. One task that’s going to be a real hassle is naming and describing the various view types. For instance, I always felt like Gregarius and FeedLounge both have River of News views, but Dave(who coined the term) noted today that River of News is not just a merging of the feeds, chronologically, but it also means no feed list on the side. Maybe it would help to have some 80×80 icons that appear when you mouse over the name of a view in the AggCompare edit mode and in the list mode.
21 responses so far ↓
Praneet Kandula // February 2, 2006 at 10:17 pm |
Two suggestions:
1) Replace the “id” field with a “description” field that more thoroughly describes the feature
2) Replace the boolean values with yes/no, or even better – pretty graphics.
John Tokash » supports_microsoft_rss_platform // February 3, 2006 at 10:21 am |
[...] Added supports_microsoft_rss_platform to AggCompare.com per this conversation. [...]
Paul (Rezzibo.com) // February 5, 2006 at 7:42 am |
Nice initiative!
Two sugestions:
1. An item for ‘available languages’ would be helpfull
2. A search page would be great. A user could just enter what he/she expects from the ‘ideal aggregator’ and the search could return a list of aggs that match that criteria.
Also, of course, you could add more graphs and a friendlier interface, but I figure the current version is mainly for retrieving info.
Danny // February 8, 2006 at 2:05 am |
This is very useful indeed, thanks!
Is the data accessible directly? If not, I’ll add the feature request for either an RDF/XML dump of the data or (better still!) a SPARQL endpoint for service querying of it.
(My list of RDF resources)
I’m not entirely sure what existing vocabularies there are for the kind of data you’ve got, DOAP might cover a fair bit, the term search on Swoogle is good too, though you’d also almost certainly have to create new terms for the agg-specific properties.
Oh, one more request – the page markup – could it be XHTML, ideally a microformat?
jtokash // February 9, 2006 at 9:58 pm |
XML export and RSS updates are already on the list. I think we need to go get a critical mass of Aggregators in the DB before we’ll have a real feel for what the microformat should consist of, but I think you’re right that we should make one.
Keep the requests coming!
Paul, I’ve talked to several people about concrete ways to give the chart a much better look and feel and I’ll try to get some of those implemented this weekend.
John Tokash » Introducing Aggregator Watch! // February 13, 2006 at 8:54 pm |
[...] AggCompare is moving along (slowly) and it’s time to start collecting feedback and contributors for its sister site, AggWatch. While AggCompare is a place for the community to document the specs of the current crop of Feed Readers, AggWatch is intended to be a place where posts from passionate Aggregator users are collected. [...]
Mustafa // April 26, 2006 at 9:15 am |
Please add a critera for conditional gets. Those clients that support this scale much better in bandwidth utilization as you increase the number of feeds and frequency of updates. Here’s a search for conditional get: http://snipurl.com/conditionalget
David Heath // May 8, 2006 at 2:44 am |
Hi,
you need an acceptable use policy or some statement about the purpose and criteria for listing. Some of the items listed are NOT “aggregator software”. For example, 24bytes, which appears first in the list seems to be just a directory of blogs. IMHO it should be removed.
Thanks for a useful tool.
David
Jickup // May 14, 2006 at 7:33 am |
I don’t see a feature indicating whether the aggregator produces a unified RSS feed from your selected feeds. That’s something I’d really like; one URI I can point to and get all my news from whatever reader I happen to be using.
Ben // May 15, 2006 at 5:21 pm |
google reader (reader.google.com) isn’t on the list of aggregators.
eikonos // May 29, 2006 at 1:07 pm |
You’ve got a nice database of different features of RSS Readers, and the one feature that would make it useful is to be able to search by the different columns. For instance, “show all freeware RSS Readers that run on Windows”.
Jerry // July 6, 2006 at 9:51 am |
I was wondering about the popularity of feed readers, like how many users really use those products, is there a top10 list of popular rss feed readers out there?
Thanks.
chippy // July 23, 2006 at 2:11 am |
build in some possibility to show only the ones in the list with “wanted properties”. so when I select for example “no cost” then all the ones that are somehow commercial should disappear from the list. Would make things easier
Thomas Black // September 1, 2006 at 6:15 am |
Ditto on what Chippy said. The ability to select only readers with “these specific features” would turn this site into the must visit site for every one looking for a new reader…
JoGi // September 3, 2006 at 12:01 pm |
If the search functionality takes time to be implementes I would be happy to be able to copy and paste the list to Excel for example, but now the “pretty graphics” are only images and not shown in only text form.
Sjoerd // October 20, 2006 at 7:05 am |
You have some spam in the list; search for buy.
Also, without filter ability this site is pretty much useless. With it, however, it would be very useful.
(JoGi, I found that doing a search and replace for the img-tag works for copy-pasting to a spreadsheet (gnumeric in my case). Just a tip.)
Ludwig // December 26, 2006 at 12:15 am |
many thanks for sharing your analysis
how about a similar comparison for pocket PC readers including mobipocket, pRSSReader, egress, feederreader etc,
Visik // February 17, 2007 at 10:18 am |
is possible to search based on feature that an aggregator has ?
for example all aggregator that:
works_on_linux
is_comfortable_for_hundreds_of_feeds
has_full_text_database_search
mbs // March 22, 2007 at 6:12 am |
I landed here looking for a short list of rss readers so I could choose whatever fits me best. However, since the database is now so good, it needs a search/filter feature as others have requested so that one can compare among whichever feature subsets one is interested in.
John Writer // April 4, 2007 at 3:28 am |
I would like to join the chorus of thanks, and the clamor for a filtering and/or sorting feature. The information is great, but impossible to use as-is; one has either to copy it to a spreadsheet or similar application, or (gasp!) print it all out and apply manual highlighting. It strikes me as odd, by the way, that there is (afaik) no standard or usual way to do this, though of course it is frequently done.
Here’s a simpler suggestion: since (I hope!) you are using some sort of database or spreadsheet software to generate this table, you could easily make a handful of tables, with the same data sorted in different ways: by platform, by cost, by browser compatibility, etc…
احسان // September 5, 2007 at 6:56 am |
great work .
please add :
need java installed
need dotnet installed
(or one word :is_portable)
thanks .