There’s a new, free online RSS aggregator in town: CNET Newsburst. Leave your feedback on Newsburst here. I just sent them a link to this post.

So I registered, added some feeds and poked around a bit. Here’s some of my thoughts:

 

During registration it says that “all fields are required” but that’s inaccurate. You don’t have to fill out the job category, primary role, industry or company size in order for the registration to take. Maybe put that info under a profile section and let those who want to give all that demographic info give it there.

What’s with all the wasted gray space on the left side of the default section: dashboard tab? [see picture at beginning of post]. Those links are huge on the left and as a reader I would like the maximum amount of reading space, not the minimum. The wasted space is the same in both IE and Firefox browsers. 

The today online section (the default that you visit when you aren’t logged in or registered and visit newsburst.com) expands to a full page, and doesn’t seem to change once you are logged in; it’s still filled with content that is chosen by CNET. So make it easier to read the content that CNET wants you to see and harder to read the content that the reader wants to read? I’m sure that’s not the intention, but that’s how it comes off. Why not expand the two column layout and make it four column and allow customization by the user for what four columns are most important?

The stream tab puts the most recent posts from all reader customized feeds in one continuous stream, but again, the same ugly, space hogging gray nothing takes up reader room.

The recommended sources section is filled with many of the familiar players who already get too much publicity. I understand why they are there and that’s cool but it would be great to see more of the smaller, niche sources in place of multiple listings for some of these feeds. Also, some of them are listed in categories where they don’t even belong like Scripting News under Open Source. Somewhat rare seeing much actual scripting-related info at scripting.com. Would have been better to put that under Tech blogs, I think.



More space-hogging gray space again in the recommended sources area could have another row of choices. Also, what’s with P2P having only one source? Is that the only blog/news/etc source with an RSS feed related to P2P? I know that’s not accurate. I think the recommended sources section is one of the weakest and poorly researched areas of this aggregator.

The add source tab allows adding RSS feeds. You can upload or link to an OPML for importing, which I tested by importing almost 200 sources from a local OPML file. It went to a blank screen in Firefox and Internet Explorer, giving me no explanation of if there was something wrong with this or not. I was able to import the same OPML file into Bloglines without any difficulty. Something buggy here.



Next, I tried using the URL function and pointing to the same OPML file uploaded to one of our websites and that didn’t work either. I consulted the Help link next to the Import button and it led to a page from October 7, 2004 that told me: “more to come soon…” — well, hopefully sooner than the four months that have passed since that was dated. Might be nice to have something in there that actually deals with the Import OPML function, that is, if Newsburst wants people to actually import feeds. Instead, this current incarnation feels like it is geared to first time RSS folks who don’t already have established sources.

Lastly I wanted to check out the RSS enclosures capabilities, because what about podcasts? No special support for podcasts, it’s sort of like that is not a factor.



Also, a lot of broken images. Some of the images for my feeds showed up and others were broken (and yes, they are in the allowed list on the htaccess).

To summarize, as a first effort for an online RSS aggregator compared against robust and thriving tools like Bloglines and Newsgator (online), Newsburst has burst, alright; it’s a bust, a dog. It’s not even a good, working representation for new users to RSS. Lots of work to do here to make this a worthy contender. Lots. You can do better, CNET. Much. Grade: D

• First attended Seattle blogger meetup OPML of attendees blogs
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• Blending FeedBlendr and Alertbear shows common weakness
• Share Your OPML already being gamed on the first day
• Get your own Megite news page with RSS, also showing some RoN love