Other people simply prefer to read their RSS streams within an application they use constantly. But Web-based RSS readers can’t authenticate themselves to get inside your firewall in this way. That means you’ll need a username and password to access your intranet feeds. For one thing, if the company you work for publishes RSS feeds for internal communications, it will probably want to keep those feeds private. Since Web-based readers allow you to see your favorite RSS feeds - no matter what computer you’re using anywhere in the world - you might wonder why anyone would want a client-based reader. Today, in my fourth and final installment in this RSS series, I’ll describe your best choices for a client-based RSS reader.

I published on July 5 a ranking of the Top 20 RSS readers, and on July 12 I rated the best of today’s Web-based readers. RSS will soon become a household word when it gains support from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.0 later this year, as I wrote on June 28.

The number has certainly grown since then. There were more than 700 “user agents” at that time polling FeedBurner’s top 800 feeds. But if you want a reader that runs as an application on your PC, there are dozens to choose from.Įarly this year, the blog for FeedBurner, a free service that manages more than 70,000 RSS feeds, released some of the most recent information I’ve seen on the number of different aggregators being used. It’s not too hard to choose a good Web-based reader for RSS (Really Simple Syndication), because there are only three major online players.

Top rss readers