I’m sure by now all of you are using an aggregator to collect your favorite blogs, photo streams, podcasts, and other updated material into one location for easy consumption — haha, just kidding, I know most of you aren’t(!). For a reminder, check out my public aggregator at herebox.org/in, which collects a slightly outdated set of feeds right here on herebox. Notice the long list of sources down the side contributing to the content.

I’ve been happily using rojo.com for years, but a gap in service from last Sunday through Tuesday prompted an overdue survey of current options. Industry leader bloglines lacks a native river-of-news view, still eliminating them from consideration immediately. Google Reader and Rojo offer both tags to organize various feeds and a river-of-news view. Google’s product imported my OPML from rojo correctly and is much cleaner and functional since my previous visit mid-last year. Rojo remains better looking than Google’s, though perhaps only due to my familiarity, however Rojo’s own AJAX based redesign mid-last year hurt its performance significantly. It is a huge resource hog when loading, occasionally causing my entire browser to become unresponsive for a few moments. Further, it periodically jumps back to the top of the page while loading. These complaints aside, I continue to prefer Rojo’s overall interaction design and organization. Google needs to improve their tag / label interface across all of their services in Gmail. Their current drop-down list is horribly slow and awkward when adding or removing tags / labels and should be complimented with a keyboard-shortcut to add-a-tag predictive-text-box, as well as showing current tags when viewing an item with 1-click removal ability (see flickr, rojo, delicious). [ed-May-23:: Google reader has a fantastic keyboard-shortcut to tag-input function. Now let's see that in Gmail!]

In summary, Google’s Reader service is catching up quickly to my remaining favorite Rojo, which is ailing from long-term performance and development issues. Apologies for limiting to the big 3; please suggest any river-of-news browser-based aggregators you would also recommend.

[ed-May18:: wow, yahoo pipes, just wow. to be reviewed. ]