Feedinvader: News Ticker and Feed Reader for Firefox
Feedinvader is an interesting Firefox plugin that combines an online feed reader with a news ticker right underneath your bookmarks bar. The feed reader in the back-end is currently mostly for managing the feeds in the ticker, but with a bit of additional work, it could also become a great reader in its own right.
The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story's excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.
Nice Ticker - But Feed Reader Needs Work
Feedinvader's feed reader itself is also worth a look, too, though in its current iteration, it is held back by a few missing features. By default, Feedinvader uses a standard, email client-like, three-pane view, with a color scheme that is somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft Outlook. You can also switch to an 'expanded' view that shows the full content of a feed without a separate pane for the headlines, but one feature we really missed in Feedinvader was a river of news-style view. What's far worse, though, is that you can't mark a story as read, and hence you also can't see how many unread items you have in any given feed or folder, making Feedinvader almost completely useless as a stand-alone feed reader.
On the positive side, the RSS reader does allow users to import and export OPML files and even import Live Bookmarks from Firefox.
If you like the ticker feature, then the feed reader definitely makes for a good way to manage these feeds, but we wouldn't recommend you ditch your favorite RSS reader like Google Reader, FeedDemon, or NetNewsWire for it.
As of now, because feeds aren't marked as read (at least as far as we can see), the ticker will loop from feed to feed, instead of listing stories in chronological order, making it best for small, high-value collections of feeds instead of a way of keeping an eye on a large collection of sources. Because of this, we would rather recommend you use a program like Snackr if you are looking for a news ticker.
Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for alerting us to Feedinvader.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
When I recommended that the RWW team would check out FeedInvader earlier today, I didn't know what I know now: in short, this Firefox add-on is not quite ready for prime time, no-matter how unobtrusively it blends with your browser environment. Here's why:
After I deleted a feed folder from the app just now so that I could try a different configuration, FeedInvader didn't erase all links to that folder, causing the ticker to continue to display obsolete feed data. That glitch, combined with other gripes that I first thought would be relatively easy to address, causes me to advise you not to install the add-on in this stage of its development.
I do hope developer Edward West will reply to our e-mail messages soon.
Thanks for the great article.
Also thanks Marjolein for keeping me from installing FeedInvador. I will keep checking back for updates b/c I would like to check it out. It should be easy to keep up b/c I am following you ;).
Also, I would like to mention that Snackr is a great code base to work with. NJ and his group did a great job with it. I should know we have been modifying it for a while now and are getting some great results.
If you would like to check out the modified project you can go to http://tweetnewz.com and check it out.
Sry, but I couldn't resist the shameless plug. ;)
I think it's a cool idea if you don't have a good method now. This may seem silly, but my favorite RSS reader comes in my SEO Book Toolbar. I just add the link, and all my favorite blogs are there. It's how I came to this page!
Before I add ANOTHER plug-in to Firefox, Mozilla needs to fix the memory issues which plague Firefox from the get go.
AND,I am easily distracted - I can watch a ticker all freakin' day and not get any work done!
Still like reading the feeds in my Google account.
Hi,
The bug with deleting a selected feed in the reader was fixed. The feeds did get deleted from your account, the ticker just didn't remove the obsolete feeds until the next time you viewed the reader, or logged in.
I'll take the above suggestions into account for the next iteration. The feed reader will likely stay fairly basic, as I don't see any point in reinventing the wheel when there are so many RSS readers already available.
Thanks,
Ed