You’ll never tear me away from bloglines. Never! OK, so the design mightn’t be pretty, but it does the job for me and I’m extremely brand-loyal.

Steve Rubel mentioned Rezzibo on Micropersuasion a few days ago. I took a quick look at the time, but didn’t register because the site was in Spanish. Only today did I discover the “Change to English Language” link…

Signing Up For Rezzibo

After signing up for an account, I decided to fill up my Rezzibo subscriptions fast-track style. I went over to Bloglines and exported my list of feeds to OPML and saved them to the hard drive. Then, from Rezzibo I uploaded the file and waited for the import to complete.

Once the initial import completes, it takes a little while for each feed to be updated. I noticed from my list of feeds that there was a ‘pending’ label on many of the feeds (in Spanish, despite my choosing English!). Having said that, Rezzibo does an admirable job of getting all my feeds present and correct - I just have to spend some time marking them all read again! Correction: I marked most of my posts read and then discovered a ‘Mark All Read’ button underneath the list of feeds!

First Impressions

Design: Oh yes, the design beats Bloglines hands down. Bright colours, lots of whitespace, no annoying frame at the side. Light gradient lines seperate the sidebar from the content and also divide each post in the RSS feed.

Language: Despite selecting English, there’s still a fair bit of Spanish in Rezzibo. Not that I’m bothered - I’ve been trying to learn the language - but the Internationalization needs addressed!

Tagging/Categories: Unless I’m missing something, there isn’t any way to organize your RSS subscriptions. Because I have a couple of blogs in different subject areas, I like to have my topic areas seperated so that I can quickly review new material. One for the wishlist.

Buttons & Views: Although small, the buttons are clearly labelled and relatively jargon-free. Each feed has buttons to change the view, displaying old posts and toggling between ‘full post’ and ‘title only’ modes. These beat Bloglines in my book, because they’re easier to get at, being on the interface rather than a tucked-away option in a pop-up menu.

Mark Read: Rezzibo takes a leaf out of Rojo’s book here and doesn’t automatically mark feeds read when you view them. Top marks for implementing this, because you have to proactively mark items read, reducing the chances that you’ll miss something (this happens me all the time in Bloglines!). There’s also the ability to save posts within Rezzibo, or to bookmark in del.icio.us.

One last thing: full marks for using .NET technologies to build this instead of php! I’d love to know a bit more about why they chose this platform..

Summary

Not bad. I sort of feel sorry for anyone who’s trying to get into the RSS Reader market these days. The established reader companies have much more mature offerings in the marketplace and a new kid like Rezzibo has a lot of catching up to do before it can match the feature set of Bloglines or Rojo.

That said, it’s an admirable beginning, and I’m going to use Rezzibo for a while to give it a proper road test. I’d like to see more clearer documentation in the future, more English, improved performance and possibly more social tools (to see who else is subscribed to a feed and to check out their subsciptions).

Bozpages aren’t unique. A webpage that displays a list of recent posts in RSS feeds? Why not use Netvibes? Or the Google Personalised Homepage?

Well, the Google IG page is as ugly as hell, for a start! Personally, I swear by Netvibes, because it gives me my Flickr galleries, my del.icio.us bookmarks and my gmail as well as the ability to add RSS feeds.

So, why use Bozpages?

There’s no reason at all, really. Technorati have just launched their favourites service which does pretty much the same thing - a river of posts syphoned off your favourite blogs. (Mine’s here)

Having said that, I love the design of Bozpages. Good whitespace. The page isn’t too cramped, and the title elements use some fresh colours.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days as a portal for some of my own blogs and sites I look after. It’s definitely a nice interface, although it needs some work on the usability front, as it’s severely lacking in on-screen documentation! You need to visit the Bozpages Wiki for more information. My Bozpage is here.

technorati tags: RSS, bozpage, Web2.0, Technorati, Netvibes