my fyre blog: Newsreader: Organize and search your feeds with Fastladder

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Newsreader: Organize and search your feeds with Fastladder

Sent to you by David via Google Reader:

Newsreader: Organize and search your feeds with Fastladder

via LH -mac -news -roundup -sponsors by Adam Pash on Jul 03, 2007

Google Reader has been our web-based RSS favorite for about the last 8 or 9 months (ever since we migrated from Bloglines), but there are a few areas where GReader has been slow in development--namely search. New web-based RSS reader Fastladder picks up the slack where Google Reader has been slow to develop.

So what makes Fastladder so great?

Fastladder has integrated search! It's really fast and easy to use. I'm not sure yet how deep the search goes (i.e., I don't know how many feed items Fastladder saves), but what's there is really good.
Multiple sorting options allow you to look at your feeds by folders, by rating (oh yeah, you can rate feeds), by subscriptions (how many Fastladder users are subscribed to a feed), or in a flat, folderless view. The different options for slicing and dicing your feeds provide great tools for making sure you can focus your attention to your most important feeds.
Feed favicons... sort of work. That means visual representations of sites through the little icons you see in your browser address bar show up next to your feed. Or at least they do with some. Lifehacker's favicon doesn't show up in the sidebar, but does show up in the feed items.
Editing feed subscriptions in Fastladder is really snappy, letting you search and change subscription settings through a nice interface.

There's more that makes Fastladder an impressive web-based feed reader, but those were the basic highlights that stood out and got me a little upset with Google Reader. That doesn't mean its necessarily time to jump ship for Fastladder yet (unless you're really dying for the extra features), but the Google Reader team best not get complacent in the face of strong web-based Reader alternatives. Aside from Google Reader, Fastladder is the best I've seen.

Fastladder