I came across these prototype projects by Microsoft this morning. I already saw the names in some feeds but I didn’t take attention to them. I just tested the two projects; they are awesome! The first one is a web based RSS and Atom reader. The second seems to be a hybrid of the first one and a bookmark interface (the goal of his development seem more obscure; probably he lacks features).
This is by far the best web based feed reader I saw for now. It’s fully integrated to the MSN Search website. It didn’t take place in your browser with a sidebar. The way they have done the interface give you the maximum space in your screen to see what is going on.
You can easily show or hide your categories by clicking on a single button.
You can add new feeds to the pre-syndicated list of feeds. These feeds are added in a My Feeds section.
All feeds are open in a single window and you can have as many windows as you wish. This feature is really interesting because you can see the headers of more than one feed at the same time.
Another, really cool little feature is the search string saving possibility. All searches you perform are saved in a section called Recent Searches. When you click on one of these recent searches it open a new “feed window” with the result of your previous search. Then you can see some feeds and search at the same time.
Try this: go to the start project one. Click on show. Then click on the Entertainment category. After click on the Dilbert link. Finally click on one of the Dilbert’s feed entry. His that not so cute?
Okay, this is a prototype project and it is not perfect; so there is a list of things that I would enjoy to see in this web base feed reader:
- I would like to be able to add or remove categories.
- I would like to be able to remove pre-syndicated feeds.
- I would like to have the possibility to have more than 5 feed entries by feed.
- I would like to have a URL to add a feed to my reader only by clicking on it (like the MyMSN button at your right).
- I would like to see if a feed entry is read or not. After, if such a system would exist, I would like to have the possibility to make all entries read.
My wish list end there for the moment. It’s like asking gifts to Santa Claus in a shopping mail. Will someone that works on this start project will read them? I don?t know but they are here in case of.
Finally what make this prototype project really interesting is that it seems that it will be fully integrated in MSN Search. It’s what makes it more interesting than the MyMSN pseudo feed reader and what make it different from services like Bloglines and NewsGator.
By the way, the first project now works on Firefox; for the second they are correcting it.