If you’re a man, I am more representative of the newsreader market than you are. According to a recent JupiterResearch report on RSS readers, 55% of those who use them are women while 45% are men. Yes, more women than men use newsreaders, at least according to that research. Why might that be? I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want a newsreader I can count on.
That’s priority one: reliability. I want a newsreader that shows me new posts! Seems like a simple enough thing to expect. Bloglines has failed and so it’s off my short list of places I regularly go on the web. I only realized that Bloglines wasn’t showing me new posts because I was expecting a daily 24 Ways fix and because posts from my feed on this blog weren’t showing up either.
I want a newsreader that gives me blogrolling capabilities. I don’t want to have to add a blog to my newsreader subscriptions and then have to add it again to a blogrolling service. I want to add it to my subscriptions and have it automagically show up on my blog.
I want a web-based newsreader. I’ve got plenty of hard drive space but I don’t want to install any more apps on my PC than I have to. I don’t want to worry about them getting updated; I don’t want to worry about spyware getting installed with it; I don’t want to have to go outside my web browser to access it.
I liked the idea of Bloglines clipping capability where I could save a post of interest to blog it later on. My understanding of how weblogs developed was that they were essentially blogging histories with commentary, allowing a blog’s readers to follow the bloggers interesting web surfing. Some blogs I read are more personal journal than actual web log, but the ones I like best introduce me to a wide range of other reading material.
I’m assuming that every newsreader allows me to categorize feeds. I need that to manage the multiplicity of feeds I follow and because I only want certain categories to show up on my blogroll.
I’ll probably try newsgator first, because I tried it once in the past and it seemed okay. I’ve added some feeds to my Yahoo! page, but that doesn’t seem very scalable.
