Top Five Personal RSS Portals

As the information flow has increased with not just the media but the blogs providing more and more analysis and news, it is tough to really sift through the important and discard the unimportant. A lot of news and information also comes through one’s emails. So, the need for information aggregation and emails has been there for sometime. RSS readers bridged that gap.

For past few years the portals such as My Yahoo and Google-personalized have done a good job of being portals. MSN’s Live has also come in and used Web 2.0 technology well.

Lately though two new players have come in – Pageflakes and Netvibes. Thunderbird from Mozilla is in a different genre of a mail reader with RSS functionality.

I wanted the following in Portal:

• Finance Quotes
• Ability to upload and download OPML files (I cannot keep adding RSS feeds!)
• Ability to read my emails – specifically Gmail.
• And some cool widgets

Here are my top favorites:

Pageflakes: This is an RSS reader based portal on steroids! Literally! It has all that I wanted to have. I uploaded my OPML file very easily and also subscribed to lots more feeds that interested me and put them in different folders. I also subscribed to my Gmail and Hotmail – and not only can I view the emails from this portal itself – I can even reply to them and compose new ones! Now, that is a very important plus for me. It also has skins just like other portals.

Netvibes: This is very similar to Pageflakes – and a predecessor – but it lacks in terms of speed and also the functionality on the emails side. I can only see the emails.

My Yahoo: My yahoo is a very useful portal that I have used for a long time. Although it is very yahoo-centric, yet it has the same web 2.0 feel to it as well as functionality as the new age portals have! the negative is that I cannot upload any OPML files. Only RSS feeds work here.

Personalized Google: Again, this is Google-centric as My yahoo is Yahoo-centric. The good thing about Google is that it is very simple design. Nothing complicated. Personalized Google has the same issue – I cannot upload any OPML files.

Bloglines: Bloglines now has beta version that is Web 2.0 based – but it is not there as far as other four are concerned! When I started my RSS journey, Bloglines was my favorite place. But now, I rarely use it.

The future portals will have most of the features of the first two – independent portals – i.e.; Pageflakes and Netvibes. They are probably good targets for both Yahoo and Google.