Personalized Desktop News Feeds

RSS Feeds are probably the best option if you want to receive information about website updates. They arrive immediately after the webmaster has published the article on the website. There are two ways to process and view those RSS feeds. The first is to use one of the many online services that display news feeds that you add to your profile. I do use Netvibes but there is also Google Reader for that task and hundreds more.

The second option is to use a desktop client to view the feeds and Mindity is the client that I’m reviewing right now. Feeds can be added by pasting a url of a feed into the interface or importing a opml file that most online and offline applications can create. I did import my opml file from Netvibes into Mindity.

Before I was able to do that I had to create an account and verify the email that I specified during setup. The import of 160 RSS feeds took several minutes and nothing was displayed after finishing the operation. I was about to give up when Mindity began updating the feeds and added roughly 1600 news items in a matter of seconds.

That was overkill at that time. New feeds after that initial download are announced with little overlay bars in the right lower corner of your system, the name of the website and the title of the article are listed there. A click on that story or in the feed reader opens an excerpt of the article.

A right-click on any item in the list opens several options like reading the full article, editing tags, marking the story read, recommending the story, feed properties and information who reads that feed (only Mindity users).

If you click on Read Story a new window opens displaying the full story on your desktop (or in your browse if you change the option). Until now Mindity was just another desktop feed reader but it does have some interesting social features.

Users can vote for stories and the global vote count of a story is displayed in Mindity. In addition those stories are displayed on the Mindity website. Users can get recommendations which are directly taken from other voters of the article that you are currently reading.

It is furthermore possible to view a list of subscribed feeds of users who voted for an article and several other means of finding new feeds that are probably interesting for you. You can also add friends to your reader which makes it easy to share feeds and news using Mindity.

What I like about it is that you are notified of updates in real time more or less while I only see new stories using Netvibes when I visit the homepage or refresh a tab that I have created. I probably will remove some of the feeds that I do not read daily from Mindity again to decrease the amount of updated feeds displayed per hour.