Feed Reader Research

With RSS you can read news faster. Discover in this article the possibilities of RSS feeds and how you can use it to stay up to date with the latest news. Just a little research can help you find the right rss reader for your needs.

Read RSS feeds for the latest news

Many people nowadays get their daily news via Twitter or Facebook, but there is another way: with RSS. With RSS feeds, you can read news from your favourite websites at lightning speed. You can browse through the news headlines, mark which ones you want to read later and save interesting articles in folders.

RSS brings the news to you, in a well-organized way. RSS is also ideal for tracking websites that don't publish new (blog) posts that often, because you can see at a glance when something new has appeared. You don't have to go to the website manually all the time. RSS still exists, even though it is not used that much anymore. In this list we have collected the most interesting RSS apps for you.

What is RSS?

RSS is a protocol for making information available on the Internet. It was co-developed by internet activist Aaron Swartz. News sites and weblogs make an RSS feed of their articles available in a standard format, which is easy to read.

Via an RSS-app you can then read them or subscribe to them. RSS gathering is also referred to as RSS aggregation, because an RSS app brings together the message flow of multiple websites.

In Flipboard, for example, you can read news from multiple websites via a single interface. You can also add all kinds of other message flows, for example from Facebook, Twitter and other social sites.

RSS Service vs. RSS Apps

In order to use an RSS you need two things:

• An RSS app, which ensures a nice display of the articles on your screen.
• An RSS service, a server service that collects the feeds for you.

Some apps such as Reeder can only read feeds and are dependent on external services. Feed Wrangler and Feedbin are for example providers of RSS services. Google Reader used to be the most widely used RSS service, but it no longer exists.

Some companies offer an all-in-one solution: Feedly, for example, offers both an RSS service and an app.

What should you pay attention to when choosing an RSS provider?

It doesn't matter which combination of app and service you use, as long as it offers the features you're looking for.

The following features are important:

• Can you easily add your own feeds?
• Do you need an account with a service like Feedbin or Feedly?
• Can you easily share articles?
• You can easily save articles for later reading
• How pleasant are the articles to read in terms of layout?
• How easy is it to browse through the news headlines?
• Can you easily import and export feeds?

With just a little research you'll find some really great feed readers out there. Just make sure you remember the points above when you're doing your research.