Web based News Aggregators

There seems to be a race between Microsoft and Google to come up with a web based news aggregator. Microsoft is currently working on something called Start.com. Google is working on their Personalised Google. Both are basically a one stop page for all your rss and atoms news syndications. Here's what Start.com looks like (my start.com, that is).

I kinda like the way MS is doing this. In Start.com, clicking the title of the news item expands the news right on the current page. It also shows the entire content of the news item. Not just a few lines. This way, I don't have to be redirected to the actual web page to read the entire story of a news item. I also like the way the selected feed is displayed as a layer on top of the page. It makes for easier reading of the selected news item. Cool.. love the shadow too.

Google's offering is currently still a little bit behind in terms of features. As of this writing, it offers only a limited number of functionality. As a matter of fact, there's no support for personal news feeds - you can't add your own feed into the site. The feed source they provide are also limited. Only 5 news feeds are made available to users - BBC News, New York Times, Google News, Slashdot, and Wired.

This is what Google Homepage looks like:

Both sites support drag and drop within the web page. You can, to some extent, personalize the way the page looks in your web browser. However, for Start.com, the drag and drop thingy is still not working in Firefox. Basically, for now, start.com is not fully supported in non IE based browsers. Google's work fine in both IE and Firefox.

Start.com does not require any login, while Google requires users to sign up (you can use your GMail user id if you already have one).

Personally, I'd prefer to use Start.com right now. Google's site is just way too limited in functionallity currently to impress me. However, I'd stick to the likes of Bloglines for news aggregation functionality. MS and Google will have to really beef up their offerings if they want to compete against the existing Web based News Aggregator like Bloglines. However, I do believe that both will turn out to be great when the final release is launched.

Start.com is currently in its so called version 3. The older versions are still available, however. If you want to test drive all the Start.com versions, head on over to Start.com V1, Start.com V2, and Start.com.