Those in the latter group have found their numbers growing rapidly through the past several months. Revolutions in the Arab world have driven many people to use Twitter as a primary news outlet, reading about current events that they do not feel are adequately covered by mainstream media directly from the source.

Unfortunately, those using Twitter do not always receive as much content from their stories as they might like. While they get great tidbits of news from here and there, everything they receive is in punctuated messages of only a few measly characters. News requires details and rich analysis. For those who really want to know what is going on in their worlds, unless a link is present to a real news story, tweets paint an incomplete picture.

While in the past people may have been forced to be content with such incomplete information, today they simply do not have to be. Thanks to a new web-based service called NewsMix you can combine Twitter and social networking news feeds with full-blown news articles.

The program acts much on the premise of many other news aggregators. You choose topics that you would like to receive news on and NewsMix puts those on your page. This particular service, however, allows you to mix Twitter feeds into your mainstream news sites, combining the brief news blurbs direct from where the action is happening with professional commentary from news agencies.

You can visit the service’s page here where you can set up an account and link it straight to your Twitter account. Choose feeds that you would like to be included on your front page and then see it populate not only with content from major news producers but also from any Twitter feeds that you choose to include.

NewsMix considers your new page to be a unique magazine of content. Each account can be custom tailored to feature news stories and feeds that some other people might find interesting as well. In light of this, the service allows other users to subscribe to your main news page so that, if you put together an interesting array of news services, users can follow your news. You can even create PDF versions of your front page – one of the services most unique features.

There are a lot of different news aggregators out there, and finding piles of news content is not difficult. What is hard, however, is tracking down a service that compliments traditional news with the Twitter feeds that you actually want to hear about. NewsMix meshes these two worlds together, and news junkies who follow both streams of content will likely find the service to be a welcome hybridisation of news sources.

Short time ago I found a nice online RSS aggregator called Rootly. Important thing is that you can customize your account very well. You can use their feed presets or even better insert your own feed addresses and create unique tabs. Rootly then collects all the news for you and displays them in a very clean and well styled interface.

You can choose in which tab your news will appear and the order of tabs too. I appreciate that this service mixes all news together and displays them on one page instead of dividing the feeds according to their source. I hope that in the future they’ll add at least one more option – the possibility to choose how many news you want to display on a single page.

And the best thing at the end – Rootly supports OpenID (read previous article for more info on that). Actually, when I found the service few weeks ago, I had some serious problems with logging in using OpenID among other minor troubles but at this time it looks like everything works fine already.

Rootly is not really an alternative if you are already using Netvibes for instance as your news aggregator. I’m basically using it at work because Netvibes has been banned there while Rootly has not. The interface of Rootly is not that intuitive and it takes a step longer to perform actions. Adding feeds for instance has to be done on a separate page while you can add them on the fly so to speak in Netvibes.