Feed Readers Evolve

It's been a few years since there was much exciting news around feed readers--software that allows users to collect and display content feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. One early leader in the technology, Pluck, even shut down their reader product in January 2007 in order to refocus the business on social media. Nevertheless, newsreaders are an interesting concept with the potential to dramatically shift control from publishers to users, once again underscoring the democratic nature of the web.

Some recent innovations are starting to make the newsreader space interesting again by finding alternatives to the uninviting unstructured, text-centric approach that characterized these products in the early days. A few examples:

MSNBC's Spectra: This beta product blows the doors off the visually boring scroll of text that had become synonymous with feed readers or, as MSNBC's marketers put it, "merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum." Surprise, the colorful, animated interface turns out to be functional as well as fun. News categories are color-coded, you can save articles to read later (must be online), and there's keyword search. A significant limit to the current product is that it's essentially a front door to the MSNBC news service; you can't add feeds from other sources. Spectra is a free and web-based.

TalkingNews: TalkingNews, also a beta, decouples the newsreader from text entirely: it uses text-to-speech technology to turn RSS and Atom feeds into simulated podcasts. You can also add your favorite podcasts to your TalkingNews reader. There are four voice options for hearing your feeds. The audio files are downloadable so, like conventional podcasts, they're available offline. TalkingNews is web-based. Basic membership, limited to two channels of two feeds each (max 60 minutes of audio per day), is free, or you can upgrade to a $19.99 annual subscription that offers ten channels of ten feeds.

PressDisplay, a Canadian company, offers a configurable viewer to organize and read news content from over 600 newspapers around the world. There's a mobile version as well as a text-to-speech option, "Newspaper Radio." You can filter content by language as well as on a spectrum from user favorites to editors' choices. You can select content from PressDisplay's many news sources, but can't add personal favorite feeds. PressDisplay is web-based, but there's a downloadable PressReader that allows offline access. There are three subscription options ranging from a limited free plan to unlimited access for $29.95 per month.