AjaxBlog.com Review: Orangoo - Ajax-enabled RSS Feed Reader

AjaxBlog.com Review: Orangoo - Ajax-enabled RSS Feed Reader
http://www.orangoo.com/

Summary
Orangoo is an online RSS and Atom feed reader that utilizes Ajax to deliver a smooth user experience for reading feeds though it still has some rough spots to iron out.

Ajax RSS feed reader
Ajax is a natural technology for something like online RSS feed reading, since you want quickly updating content. So we were excited to try another online feed reader - Orangoo, written by Amir Salihefendic.

Easy sign-up
The sign up process was painless. Simply enter your email address and a password. You can select a RSS feed content pack (a nice idea) to get started. Note that the lack of a Privacy Policy will be concerning to many people.

Familiar interface
After signing in, you see your feeds in a classic, similar to email style 3 pane window. Click on a feed on the left to view the items in the feed. The items fill in above the main viewing area.

Subscribe to feeds
A list of feeds you can subscribe to “out of the box” are provided. Subscribing to these is dead-easy. Just click on the feed to subscribe. It doesn’t get easier that this. There are some good ones there, too, which is nice.

Subscribing to a custom feed
Subscribing to a custom feed URL didn’t seem to be working 100%. When we tried subscribing to the AjaxBlog.com RSS feed (http://ajaxblog.com/feed/) we got an error. We suspect this may be due to us using Feedburner to deliver our feeds, which involves a redirection, which maybe Orangoo doesn’t support yet? Entering the direct Feedburner feed URL did work, however. It also appears that Orangoo was only displaying the excerpt from our Feedburner feed, although we publish full-text in the feed. Weird.

Room for improvement
There are a couple of areas that suggest improvement:

No stated Privacy Policy
Everyone needs a privacy policy, especially when you are collecting people’s email addreses.

No key commands
One really nice thing about Google’s feed reader is that you can advance to the next item by clicking j or to the previous one by pressing k. That would be a nice addition to this feed reader.

Syntax errors
We got occasional random javascript “Syntax Error” dialog boxes popping up. Also, when we tried certain things we got other errors. This seems to still be a little rough around the edges in this department.

del.icio.us integration
The del.icio.us integration seemed to not be working 100% smoothly. In addition, while we were testing the application it seemed to change (maybe we caught it right in the middle of a release?) The potential for integration is definitely there. Looking forward to a good implementation.

Summary
Orangoo is a promising web-based RSS feed reader that leverages Ajax to provide a smooth user experience for reading feeds. It is very similar to reading your email, and requires a mouse to navigate. There are still some rough spots to the application, but it’s worth checking out nonetheless.

Go to Orangoo.com

Thanks to eHub for the pointer to Orangoo.

Update: Just found another review over at AjaxReview.com. Go check it out.