February 2, 2006  

Introducing AggCompare.com

No two RSS Aggregators are the same. Features that seem core in one aggregator are far down on the feature list for another. It’s hard to make a choice. Enter AggCompare.com. It’s only a few hours old and I still have a lot of plans for it, but it’s ready to start storing the data. Please head over there and enter a profile of your favorite Aggregator.

If you have any feature requests or if you think it’s missing some important criteria, let me know in the comments section of this post.

Update: Praneet(in the comments) is right, of course. I need to put descriptions on each of the criteria. One task that’s going to be a real hassle is naming and describing the various view types. For instance, I always felt like Gregarius and FeedLounge both have River of News views, but Dave(who coined the term) noted today that River of News is not just a merging of the feeds, chronologically, but it also means no feed list on the side. Maybe it would help to have some 80×80 icons that appear when you mouse over the name of a view in the AggCompare edit mode and in the list mode.

21 responses to “Introducing AggCompare.com”

  1. Praneet Kandula says :

    Two suggestions:

    1) Replace the “id” field with a “description” field that more thoroughly describes the feature

    2) Replace the boolean values with yes/no, or even better – pretty graphics.

  2. Paul (Rezzibo.com) says :

    Nice initiative!

    Two sugestions:

    1. An item for ‘available languages’ would be helpfull

    2. A search page would be great. A user could just enter what he/she expects from the ‘ideal aggregator’ and the search could return a list of aggs that match that criteria.

    Also, of course, you could add more graphs and a friendlier interface, but I figure the current version is mainly for retrieving info.

  3. Danny says :

    This is very useful indeed, thanks!

    Is the data accessible directly? If not, I’ll add the feature request for either an RDF/XML dump of the data or (better still!) a SPARQL endpoint for service querying of it.

    (My list of RDF resources)

    I’m not entirely sure what existing vocabularies there are for the kind of data you’ve got, DOAP might cover a fair bit, the term search on Swoogle is good too, though you’d also almost certainly have to create new terms for the agg-specific properties.

    Oh, one more request – the page markup – could it be XHTML, ideally a microformat?

  4. jtokash says :

    XML export and RSS updates are already on the list. I think we need to go get a critical mass of Aggregators in the DB before we’ll have a real feel for what the microformat should consist of, but I think you’re right that we should make one.

    Keep the requests coming!

    Paul, I’ve talked to several people about concrete ways to give the chart a much better look and feel and I’ll try to get some of those implemented this weekend.

  5. Mustafa says :

    Please add a critera for conditional gets. Those clients that support this scale much better in bandwidth utilization as you increase the number of feeds and frequency of updates. Here’s a search for conditional get: http://snipurl.com/conditionalget

  6. David Heath says :

    Hi,

    you need an acceptable use policy or some statement about the purpose and criteria for listing. Some of the items listed are NOT “aggregator software”. For example, 24bytes, which appears first in the list seems to be just a directory of blogs. IMHO it should be removed.

    Thanks for a useful tool.

    David

  7. Jickup says :

    I don’t see a feature indicating whether the aggregator produces a unified RSS feed from your selected feeds. That’s something I’d really like; one URI I can point to and get all my news from whatever reader I happen to be using.

  8. Ben says :

    google reader (reader.google.com) isn’t on the list of aggregators.

  9. eikonos says :

    You’ve got a nice database of different features of RSS Readers, and the one feature that would make it useful is to be able to search by the different columns. For instance, “show all freeware RSS Readers that run on Windows”.

  10. Jerry says :

    I was wondering about the popularity of feed readers, like how many users really use those products, is there a top10 list of popular rss feed readers out there?

    Thanks.

  11. chippy says :

    build in some possibility to show only the ones in the list with “wanted properties”. so when I select for example “no cost” then all the ones that are somehow commercial should disappear from the list. Would make things easier

  12. Thomas Black says :

    Ditto on what Chippy said. The ability to select only readers with “these specific features” would turn this site into the must visit site for every one looking for a new reader…

  13. JoGi says :

    If the search functionality takes time to be implementes I would be happy to be able to copy and paste the list to Excel for example, but now the “pretty graphics” are only images and not shown in only text form.

  14. Sjoerd says :

    You have some spam in the list; search for buy.

    Also, without filter ability this site is pretty much useless. With it, however, it would be very useful.

    (JoGi, I found that doing a search and replace for the img-tag works for copy-pasting to a spreadsheet (gnumeric in my case). Just a tip.)

  15. Ludwig says :

    many thanks for sharing your analysis

    how about a similar comparison for pocket PC readers including mobipocket, pRSSReader, egress, feederreader etc,

  16. Visik says :

    is possible to search based on feature that an aggregator has ?

    for example all aggregator that:

    works_on_linux

    is_comfortable_for_hundreds_of_feeds

    has_full_text_database_search

  17. mbs says :

    I landed here looking for a short list of rss readers so I could choose whatever fits me best. However, since the database is now so good, it needs a search/filter feature as others have requested so that one can compare among whichever feature subsets one is interested in.

  18. John Writer says :

    I would like to join the chorus of thanks, and the clamor for a filtering and/or sorting feature. The information is great, but impossible to use as-is; one has either to copy it to a spreadsheet or similar application, or (gasp!) print it all out and apply manual highlighting. It strikes me as odd, by the way, that there is (afaik) no standard or usual way to do this, though of course it is frequently done.

    Here’s a simpler suggestion: since (I hope!) you are using some sort of database or spreadsheet software to generate this table, you could easily make a handful of tables, with the same data sorted in different ways: by platform, by cost, by browser compatibility, etc…

  19. احسان says :

    great work .

    please add :

    need java installed

    need dotnet installed

    (or one word :is_portable)

    thanks .

Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  1. John Tokash » supports_microsoft_rss_platform - February 3, 2006
  2. John Tokash » Introducing Aggregator Watch! - February 13, 2006
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