But my problem with trying to keep up with forums these days is that sometimes they are incredibly fast paced. A topic can balloon into several pages in less than an hour and then be basically done. Or go onto several hundred pages in weeks which you can never catch up on.

So you have basically two options: mark all as read every once in a while, or start to ignore the forums. I started with the first and then moved on to the second.

Now my addiction is RSS and twitter, both of which I can more easily control the flow of. Want more? Add a follower or a feed. Want less? Drop a few. I only wish there was a way to not have duplicate RSS items about the same news story from separate sources. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an Apple story reported on by 10 different feeds with no new information after the first.

The Wired magazine was useless because I’m Canadian.

The coupons are kind of nice, but the only one I would use is ThinkGeek and I buy from them maybe once a year.

The full RSS feeds and nice layout are neat as well.

But I didn’t think any of this was worth $50.

I did end up subscribing though. Because Ars Technica is awesome. I love the articles. I love the detail of the articles and I love the fact that they do some awesome features on random things. And that is worth $50 to support something like that.

Looks wonderful, I can’t wait until this comes out. Finally an MMO where taking on more than one NPC is normal and won’t get your ass handed to you.

For those of us really into the whole internet thing, we need our RSS feeds so we can get our information as fast as possible. You should have this blag on your RSS feed already! *shakes fist*

Let’s take a look at two big web based feed readers: Netvibes and Google Reader.

The Layout
Netvibes allows you to see the top 1-40 of any feed you have on a page at a time. As many feeds as you want on each page, pages being organized by tabs. 1-4 columns, variable width. It’s very nice to move everything around with AJAX. Click on a feed and it changes to have all the titles of that feed on the left side and as I click on them they come up.

Google Reader has all your feeds laid out on the left side, organized by category. You can then view each feed as a full page view or as a large list. It allows for as much backtracking as you need, grabbing older items the farther you scroll back.

The Customization
Netvibes allows various tweaks to each widget such as the inclusion of extra details, arrows to flip through elements, post date. Also you can change titles, keyboard shortcuts, themes, wallpapers and hide the search box. Enough stuff to make anyone satisfied.

Google Reader allows you to choose which page to start on, easy removal of the navigation pane and… well that’s about it.

The Extras
Netvibes has many extra widgets outside of the realm of RSS. From simple games to being able to check your email, gmail to hotmail to anything pop3. Facebook, myspace, notes, todo lists, embedding websites within netvibes. It also has ‘universes’ which allows any user to see whatever another user decided to make public from his/her universe.

Google Reader is inevitably tied in with everything google. Gmail, google calendar, google docs,  etc. It also has one nice button to refresh all of your feeds at once. You can share feeds with friends on google as well, easily found with google contacts.

Other Mentionables
Netvibes goes down. Recently it has done so a lot. It also sometimes marks all items of a feed unread. I usually know the last on I’ve read anyway but this can get annoying.

Google Reader is slow. You have to wait easily over a second to see the items in a feed after clicking on it. This might be acceptable except Netvibes is much faster on this.

Which one should you choose?
Play around with both. Find out what you like. One might be better for your specific needs.

I use Netvibes because I’m constantly getting updates throughout the day. The ability to see specifically what these are is very helpful for me. Take a look at my universe if you want.

I assume the setup of Google Reader allows for someone to accumulate a lot of news items and then read them all at once much faster which is better if you want to splurge feeds for a while then get back to whatever you were doing.