Gritwire, Not Just an RSS Feed Reader

There are so many RSS feed readers available nowadays. What makes or breaks them? I think the answer is the unique features they provide. It doesn’t matter if they are web- or desktop based. The most important aspect is whether or not they give us an excellent experience while we use them. 

I have come across an excellent piece of RSS feed reader that not only helps you to subscribe to RSS feeds. I am talking about Gritwire. What’s cool about Gritwire is that they have added a few features that you won’t be able to find in any RSS feed reader. For example, they have their own built-in podcast player, the Gritcast Player, which supports mp3 and any other formats that are supported by Windows Media Player and Quicktime.

Gritwire comes with a feed reader - Speedfeed. Like the name suggests, adding and reading feeds is very simple and, obviously, fast. And of course, like any other RSS feed reader, it enables you to organize your feeds into folders, to read and save content of the feeds, or rate feeds and feed items.

If you find a particular forum or blog that you intend to visit in future, you should add them to the Quicklinks. This might come in handy if you’re away from your own laptop and stumble upon an interesting article or a website that you want to revisit later on.

Other than that, Gritwire features a few other widgets that you might be interested in, like the weather forecast. But if you don’t feel like you need it, simply close it. You can always take a look at the closed widgets again just by clicking on the tools’ icons residing right at the bottom of your Gritwire.

To add a social networking feel to it, you can even share your favourite RSS feeds with your friends. And this feature will definitely make your life easier if you want your friends with similar reading interests to share what they read.

Gritwire had come a long way before they achieved what they are now. In order to keep up with their users’ demands, they have come up with tutorials and a new lab section for them to experiment with new features. While I was there, I came across their fancy badge creation tool. It looks rather interesting because it would indirectly help your friends to get to know what you are reading on Gritwire.

I was wondering: could it be possible for them to allow readers to use the features without even signing up. Personally, I hate it when I have to sign up for any RSS feed reader service in advance, only to find out that the features available are useless. It would be great if they can let the users try out some of the features before signing up.

Gritwire - A Set of useful Tools for People who use the Web Daily