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 a definetely 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. Below is a screen shot with an arrow pointing at the folder scheme. You’ll also notice that the navigation once inside the folders look slightly similar to a product that we all know (hint: iTunes).

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 thats what counts. Maybe I’m just so used to the panes that PageFlakes and NetVibes provide.

For those who aren’t familiar with NetVibes, the website allows users to import RSS feeds from all types of other web applications and publications, including Wall Street Journal, Flickr, YouTube, NY Times, etc. NetVibes is customizable and is one of my homepages. Tabs can also be utilized for all of the feeds that you want to subscribe to.

Earlier this morning, NetVibes had a slight outage of servers because of its upgrade. After the upgrade was complete, there was a great new feature added to NetVibes as part of its Coriander initiative: Resizable columns for the RSS feed boxes.

“Until now, you could adjust the layout with 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns to take advantage of all you screen space. Today, we are pushing the layout possibilities a bit further by allowing the columns to have a custom width. Have a module with your favorite comics?  Simply make your column wider so you can read it comfortably,” wrote Tariq Krim, founder of NetVibes on his blog.

In the above screen shot, I drew an arrow to point out where you adjust the column width within NetVibes’ RSS boxes.

I’m really looking forward to some of the upcoming features NetVibes is looking to add to its user interface such as the ability to choose a background image and the stock quotes module.

Google Book Search:
Google has centralized a location for Scary Stories that were digitized as part of the Google Book Search project.  “What would Halloween be without a little trick-or-treating? This year, make exploring some of these classic spooky tales part of your treat. Discover who famously uttered ‘nevermore,’ why Van Helsing was forced to behead the ‘bloofer lady’ and how Ichabod Crane met his untimely end in a tranquil glen called Sleepy Hollow [source].”  Google had digitized numerous full texts of Halloween-related books such as Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Tell-Tale Heart.

NetVibes: 
Netvibes also decided to keep up with the Halloween spirit by providing a Halloween theme.  Providing this theme is another reason why I have been sticking with NetVibes as my homepage.  The thought that these programmers went to the extent of keeping up with the Halloween spirit is commendable.

[Picture Source: NetVibes Blog]

 On the Netvibes blog, Tariq KRIM announced that Netvibes has introduced a “digital assistant” for personalized Netvibes pages.  “This new module allows you to simultaneously look for pictures with the most popular search engines, including Flickr, Google, Zooomr and Yahoo! [source].”

There are two modes that users can select when searching for images: normal mode and detailed mode.  In the normal mode, when you search for certain keywords on the selected search module, thumbnails are pulled up so that you can preview what images are found.  In the detailed mode, extra information is displayed such as picture dimensions when using Google Image Search or Yahoo! Image Search or tags when searching Flickr and Zoomr.  When the tags are pulled up in the image module search, you can click on the tags and it will find related images with the same tag. 

Below is a screenshot of what the digital assistant looks like in the normal mode:

I just started using Netvibes today and found myself addicted to the website right away.  I immediately customized my personalized Netvibes page and added it as a homepage tab to my recently downloaded Internet Explorer 7.0.  I would definetely recommend Netvibes non-users to sign-up today.