![]() You must click a link to open a new window to see the full text. Instead, both columns show only headlines (and, optionally, summaries). Unlike Bloglines and NewsGator Online, My Yahoo does not use the right side of its two-column layout to show the full text of news items. Once you get the layout the way you want it, My Yahoo offers you a view of just those bits of information you need to check every day. With its easy page customization, My Yahoo aims to be “a dashboard to your life,” not just an RSS reader, Gatz says. My Yahoo has integrated its feeds into a mobile product for users of advanced cell phones and other portable devices. Stock prices, for example, may change thousands of times a day. Much of this information will never be available as an RSS feed. This includes stock quotes, localized weather, current air fares, alerts to new e-mail (for users of Yahoo addresses), and more. Yahoo has worked for more than 10 years to integrate constantly updated information from a wide variety of sources. Yahoo’s Gatz makes a strong case that My Yahoo is the best online RSS reader, for the following reasons: Not counting the 10 most popular feeds, Bloglines would represent only 46% more subscriptions than My Yahoo, not 192% more (as shown in Table 2).īy any measure, My Yahoo is a huge online service that delivers news and entertainment feeds of all kinds to 25 million users, according to the company. If only half of Bloglines’ users have been active within the past 30 days, Bloglines would represent only 1/10 as many total RSS subscriptions as My Yahoo, not 1/5 (as shown last week in Table 1). Greg Reinacker, CTO of NewsGator Technologies, says that his company’s Web-based RSS reader, NewsGator Online, reports “everyone who hasn’t canceled.” Both Bloglines’ and NewsGator Online’s counts, therefore, would be lower if only those users who’ve logged on in the past 30 days were reported. “As far as I know, My Yahoo is the only one that monitors activity,” he states. Asked what percentage of Bloglines accounts have logged in lately, Fletcher demurred: “I’m not exactly sure what we can release.” He cited a recent acquisition of Bloglines by Ask Jeeves as one reason exact figures can’t be given out. Mark Fletcher, the founder of Bloglines, confirms that his service reports every subscriber, even those who haven’t checked in for months. ![]() “I understand that Bloglines counts the total number of people who’ve ever subscribed,” he says. Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products for, says My Yahoo counts (and reports to FeedBurner) only those subscribers who’ve actually logged into their online accounts within the last 30 days. In separate interviews this week, spokesmen for My Yahoo and Bloglines differed over how their online services count subscribers. In this second list, Bloglines came in first with 19.5% of subscriptions, while My Yahoo dropped to sixth place with 6.7%. Since some RSS feeds are turned on by default for many new My Yahoo users, I also published a Top 20 list that excluded the 10 most popular feeds. My column showed that My Yahoo tops every other RSS reader, claiming 59% of all RSS subscriptions. Client-based RSS users are easily counted (each personal computer is counted once per feed.) Web-based readers, by contrast, self-report a subscriber count for each feed as part of HTML’s so-called User-Agent string. The figures were provided by FeedBurner, a free service that handles more than 70,000 RSS feeds. I published figures in that column on the top 20 RSS readers, both online and client-based. Getting good numbers on the most popular online readers of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) isn’t easy, as I said in my column last week.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |