Khim Hoe recently told me about another web based RSS reader called News Alloy. After coming to a conclusion that Bloglines was by far irreplaceable in my previous blog entry on RSS readers, I went to try it out since he said it was pretty decent.
Initial impressions was that it has a similar feel to Bloglines, but with more Web 2.0-_ish_ elements. As with my previous tests, I imported my Bloglines exported feeds into it. Importing went fine, but then a problem surfaced. Quite a fair bit of feeds which I knew were updated recently did not contain any entries in them which seemed something went wrong. The problem was that Newsalloy does not grab the feeds’ entries immediately after being added and is probably added to some sort of queue.
The AJAX interface has a similar flaw to Newsgator which is you would have to scroll down and up between reading feeds and going back to your feeds sidebar. After loading a few feeds that were available, I started to feel that they’ve tried to cramp too many icons/links onto the screen which made it feel cluttered. On the plus side, loading speed of feeds are pretty close to Bloglines.
I won’t be shifting from Bloglines to this, but for those who dislike Bloglines’s simplicity and Newsgator’s slowness, you could give this a shot.