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RSS is a great way to help reduce bandwidth waste and a great way to read the news. I love RSS. I find having a program with all of my news feeds together is much more efficient for me than looking at the ten or so sites separately. It also has features like a quick search and allows me to read the news on my laptop when I don't have a net connection.

My suggestions for good and free clients are:

Windows: Feed Demon OS X: Vienna

Not only are they great readers, but they also support CSS-Styled views...I can't stand RSS readers that look and behave like email clients.

Oops, you missed out Liferea (Linux). BUT (and thats one big BUT) though both Vienna and Liferea support browser-like eerm.. browsing (via the address-bar), a lot of rss-readers do not have the ability to block adverts by means of plugins or addons. Liferea offers the about:config, but I'm not sure how Vienna could handle this. I'd use an rss-reader only (in this handicapped internet situation) that downloads ONLY the full text, and nothing more.

RSS is a great way to help reduce bandwidth waste and a great way to read the news. I love RSS. I find having a program with all of my news feeds together is much more efficient for me than looking at the ten or so sites separately. It also has features like a quick search and allows me to read the news on my laptop when I don't have a net connection.

My suggestions for good and free clients are:

Windows: Feed Demon
OS X: Vienna

Not only are they great readers, but they also support CSS-Styled views...I can't stand RSS readers that look and behave like email clients.

Of course, Firefox 3 isn't either - *if* you include standards it hasn't got to yet.

As for time horizons - half a year from when? FF3 only went gold on June 17! We get a toolbar from Newsgator which they initially refused to fix a bug until there was an RC rather than a beta. Fortunately they did fix and ship the xpi but that's a small project compared to a CMS!

However, as we've previously seen with the Suite and Thunderbird, Mozilla can do no wrong on Slashdot when it comes to casting loose products which both individuals and businesses depend on. Meanwhile god help Gates and Ballmer if they talk about ending Windows XP support.

A few things I personally couldn't live without that are missing from this list

* VoodooPad - for general note taking, todo lists, etc
* TextMate - self explanatory
* Camino - for web surfing
* Paparazzi! - for taking quick screenshots or thumbnails of web pages
* Colloquy - irc client
* twitterific - interface for twitter
* NetNewsWire - Feed reader

I use Googles /ig page, and when my browser opens I can see at a glance my email, my calendar, and top headlines via RSS feeds from a dozen different websites. All on one page. Why wouldn't you use a customized portal??

I've abandoned Outlook and barely got started with Thunderbird. I want a simple useful interface that allows me to get to my email anywhere I have an internet connection.

There is. IMAP.

My world: CommuniGate Pro, on a RHEL box. I run Outlook on the desktop, because:

1. CommuniGate's MAPI connector allows Outlook to act and function as a 'groupware' server transparently
2. I love NewsGator - synchronised RSS feeds via a web and Outlook interface, depending on where I am.
3. Phone synchronisation. For better or worse Nokia and Sony Ericssons PC synchronisation suites only like Outlook (Lotus Notes, etc, but that's neither here nor there) - so I can sync my phone's contact lists and calendars, all good
4. (Skinnable) Webmail for when not at my primary pc. WAP mail (more useful in the past - my phone now has native IMAP support) for when not at a PC at all.
5. Not as powerful as Asterisk, but a fully fledged SIP PBX.

Obligatory: not an employee, a happy customer.

Although GMail doesn't have it, there are other clients that do this. Notably Newsgator Outlook Edition (http://newsgator.com/consumer.aspx). It will also sync automagically to Newsgator.com, FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire.

Disclaimer: I work for Newsgator. But it's still cool software!

IMHO, the in-browser (Safari, Firefox) RSS features kind of suck, and are fairly limited in their usefulness.

To really appreciate the technology, you need to be using a good aggregator. For desktop applications, Thunderbird is actually pretty decent (I like that it loads the web pages themselves in the preview pane). Or since you're using a Mac, you might want to try NetNewsWire (I'm not a Mac user so can't say anything about it personally, but I've heard good reviews on that one). Alternative, there are a number of free web-based aggregators out there - Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader, probably others I can't think of offhand. All have their own strengths and weaknesses.

For sites like the BBC, I find it's still easier to just go to the site when I want to check the latest news - the problem with it is that it generates so many headlines that your reader quickly gets flooded, and it's unlikely you're interested in all of them anyway.

Where it really shines though is for the sites that don't generate hundreds of headlines, but more like 10 a day, or 10 a week. If you've ever gone to a web site only to find there's no new content since your last visit, or forget to check it because it's updated so infrequently, or if you've missed content because it fell off the front page since your last visit - these are the problem RSS solves.

Personally, I like having a single interface for almost all of the content I like to read on the web. News sites will usually only syndicate the headline and a blurb, but most of the most popular blogs syndicate the entire item, so there's rarely even a need to click through to the web site to read it. I organize my feeds into folders - "Technology", "Politics", etc. It all gets aggregated into one place, and I can effectively read 5-10 sites at once, without seeing what I read already and without ever missing something new. In total I'm subscribed to about 70 feeds that I read - I honestly can't imagine that it would be possible to keep up with that much content manually checking all those sites.

If you've ever used e-mail alerts, it's quite similar, only a better implementation. Another close analog would be usenet, where newsgroups would be downloaded into your reader and there's a distinction between what you've read and haven't.

Plus, there's other uses of the technology besides getting headlines. I wouldn't subscribe to an RSS feed for the weather, but weather widgets certainly make use of them. It's obviously critical to podcasting. My Yahoo and other personalized portals make use of them, and "Friends pages" on social networking sites like Livejournal work by utilizing the RSS feeds. I haven't seen it implemented yet, but it's not hard to imagine their utility for pushing software updates in the future, and there's probably a dozen other uses.

FeedDemon - yeah, to get your $25 worth it helps to OPML and how to transform XML, but that's what I like about it.

Straw - for when I'm in the Gnome .

BlogLines - web-native but with an API to die for.

AmphetaDesk - around for a while, great if you like shooting your foot of in Perl.

NewsGator - for Outlook - still, you can tweak it to feed event-extended RSS into your task calendar.

rss2Email - for when my Knoppix install has nothing better to do.

SharpReader - not as good as FeedDemon, but less expensive. There are a few others, the WikiPedia has a good handle on that - point is, how is the IBM tool different than all of the above? Are they not going to use RSS or ATOM feeds?

Try http://www.newsgator.com

I just discovered a great RSS news reader that integrates seamlessly with Outlook 2000 and newer called NewsGator. You can add feeds from NNTP as well but the nicest feature is the ability to right-click on an RSS link and select subscribe to. You can set NewsGator to check feeds at a set interval and if anything new is found it will notify you with an icon and balloon tooltip in the tray area. It's $29 but it's a nicely polished, well designed RSS news reader. The only problem I found, and this is an Outlook problem I believe, is I couldn't set the NewsGator folder home page to be the first thing I see when I open Outlook.