There is a slightly new player in the market of RSS consolidation, Feedable. The current major players are PageFlakes, Netvibes, and the search engines that allow you to customize homepages.
Currently, my vote for the best one out there is Netvibes because with PageFlakes, once you click on a link, you are immediately taken to an external website. Netvibes provides a pane with a text/image preview and then you can choose to move to the external page also.
Feedable is slightly different from the rest of the RSS consolidators though and could come out to be a fighter. While PageFlakes and NetVibes support tabs, Feedable goes by more of a cascading folder style. This is definitely a different approach and I could foresee this as being an advantage.
Netvibes load time takes a blow for every RSS feed that you add to your customized page. For example, I subscribe to over 100 RSS feeds and NetVibes loads all of the stories from each feed. In the title of your customized Netvibes page, it displays the number of feed articles that is being loaded. Basically, my NetVibes customized page isn’t finished loading until 717 articles are loaded into the system.
To my understanding, Feedable doesn’t actually load the feed until you call upon a folder or category. So if you don’t want to read up on a certain category or folder, why should it have to be loaded? This is an advantage that Feedable should consider exploiting.
In summary, I really like the idea of Feedable’s navigation, but I think that the site looks a little bit tacky. There is just something about it that makes me not want to switch from NetVibes just yet. Feedable has potential and that’s what counts. Maybe I’m just so used to the panes that PageFlakes and NetVibes provide.
