RSS Feed Readers: Changing from Netvibes Wasabi to Google Reader
Posted July 29, 2010 – 3:55 pm
I’ve finally done it: I’ve changed over from Netvibes Wasabi to Google Reader as my main RSS reader.
Switching to Google Reader
Back in March, I did a detailed comparison of Windows RSS readers and concluded that Netvibes Wasabi and Google Reader were the two best feed readers.
For desktop viewing, the main tradeoff at that time was between design / readability and feed handling. Google Reader was hands-down better at handling a wide range of different types of feeds. Netvibes was, to my eye at least, the hands-down winner in terms of design and readability.
Despite the problems with the feed handling, I ended up sticking with Netvibes.
But as of yesterday, that’s changed: I have now permanently switched over to Google Reader and dropped Netvibes.
The reason for the change was three-fold:
- I have some new responsibilities and simply can’t work around Netvibes feed handling issues any longer
- I found a Chrome extension that allows you to easily create your own skin for Google Reader, so I added some custom CSS and now have a Netvibes-type layout (see separate post)
- I’m need better mobile access to my feeds and that favors Google Reader by a lot
The feed handling piece deserves some further discussion. Turns out that I am putting some abnormally tough demands on the readers because I want to use messy feeds generated by RSS feed remixing services like Yahoo Pipes, FeedRinse, and Feedweaver.
As I noted in March, Netvibes handles normal feeds that most people are going to be using perfectly well – a CNN feed or a Techcrunch feed, etc. But it is a lot less effective than Google Reader at handling the funky feeds these remixing sites pump out.
To be clear, these sites pump out feeds that are often not truly ‘valid’ as defined by the W3C. Many of them fail the W3C Feed Validator test. In some cases, e.g., FeedRinse, the Validator isn’t even really able to test them, but nonetheless, Google Reader cranks out these feeds out reliably where Netvibes will not. In the case of FeedRinse, Netvibes often can’t even determine there’s a feed there to be read.
Having used Netvibes for many years, I have something of an emotional attachment to them, so I’m sorry for the parting, but so it goes.
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[...] I switched to Google Reader from Netvibes Wasabi, I created a custom skin using a Google Chrome extension called Reader Plus. The result was to make [...]