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Google recently revamped Google Reader to a healthy dose of criticism. If you're unhappy with the changes to Google Reader, we've highlighted some alternative feed aggregators to consider.

We've broken down the choices to Web, Android, and iOS, but some apps are available across multiple platforms and devices.

Feedly (Firefox and Chrome) Feedly is an aggregator that actually pulls feeds from Google Reader. It offers different viewing styles, including titles, magazine, mosaic, and full article. Feedly also has one of the most comprehensive sharing options we've seen. Items can be sent to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, … Read more

You know something went wrong with your Web site's redesign when two people who used to work on it publish detailed, scathing assessments.

Google Reader, revamped this week, falls into that category. Google gave the RSS site the new red-and-black look that's sprouting at Gmail and elsewhere and, deeper down, changed the mechanics of how people can share posts they're interested in.

Former Google Reader product manager Brian Shih took Google to task for a monochromatic user interface (UI) that squanders too much screen space on a header bar and for making it harder to share posts: &… Read more

When you can't make it home for every episode, or two shows you like are on at the same time, digital recorders can catch every moment for later viewing. However, if you're watching a lot of shows, it's hard to keep track of what's airing each night. So how about an easier way to see what shows are coming up and which ones are already in your queue for watching? Here's how to turn your Google Calendar or Reader into a personal TV guide:

Getting started

Step 1: Create an account at TVRage.com and … Read more

ChannelCaster for Android lets users create and publish personalized "channels" that aggregate news from thousands of supported news sources. In addition to all of the expected big-name publications and blogs, ChannelCaster can pull feeds from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. Its design is clean and visually appealing with its sharp, vibrant thumbnails, and its navigation is incredibly simple with only three main tabs along the top of the app.

The Favorites tab is really the heart of the ChannelCaster experience. This is where you save your most frequently visited channels, and presumably where you'll spend most of … Read more

This is probably the weirdest device we've seen so far--and for good reason. Check out this dispenser that prints your Twitter/RSS feeds on toilet paper. It's made by one Mario Lukas from Germany (we're guessing the designer didn't want to risk bringing his smartphone or tablet along when nature calls).

The printer was made mostly from wood, as well as bits and pieces salvaged from old CD drives. As is the case with many things DIY-ed these days, an Arduino controller works the bathroom contraption.

Watch this video to see how the device was constructed. … Read more

If you use Google Reader for Android (download), chances are you're not too excited about the service's interface, especially when it's miniaturized on a mobile touch screen. If that's the case, we'd like to direct your attention to Feedly for Android (download). Essentially, Feedly wraps your Google Reader feeds in a neat, feature-rich, simple-to-use package. It syncs with your Reader account seamlessly, is much easier on the eyes than the bare-bones Google Reader app, and plays nicely with a whole lot more third-party services.

When you first launch the Feedly app, it opens up directly … Read more

Essentially, Feedly wraps your Google Reader (download) in a neat, feature-rich package. It's much easier on the eyes than the bare-bones Google Reader app, and it plays nicely with a whole lot more third-party services.

When you first launch the Feedly app, it opens up directly to featured content. That's because it comes preloaded with RSS feeds from many of the Web's most popular sites. These preloaded "Essentials" cover a number of verticals such as technology, design, and business. This means that even without syncing with your Google Reader account, you can enjoy RSS feeds … Read more

What do you want to read? Roman Karachinsky of News360 is pretty sure you don't really know. But he's got an app to get you what you're interested in anyway.

While traditional news readers, like Google Reader, let you easily subscribe to news sources, they're not too good at discovery, the art of finding stories and sources of stories that you'd probably like, but don't know about.

On the other hand, social sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, as well as industry-specific sites like Techmeme, can be great for discovery, since they point you to stories flagged as important by people in your network. But they won't help you sort through the boring items you need to see everyday but that nobody comments on.

Karachinsky's new app is a socially and algorithmically powered reader. Like Google Reader, FlipBoard, or my new favorite RSS tool, Reeder, it ingests stories and gives you the RSS versions of them, as well as links to the full Web pages. But unlike RSS or traditional subscription services, News360 breaks your news into categories, not sources; and it combines news from several sources for each story (like Techmeme or Google News does). For example, I'm looking at a "Politics: World" story about China and cyber attacks. There's one headline and links to four main sources of news, plus a link that says "70 more" if I want to see every single angle on the story.

… Read more

The Internet is the Best Thing Ever for news junkies, and RSS feeds help make it that way. Pmcc's News Messenger is a free news reader that reads not only Atom and RSS pages but also HTML, so it can read headlines from sites that don't support syndication. It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or higher.

We extracted and saved News Messenger's program file, which immediately scanned for updated headlines when we opened it. The program displays headlines and brief summaries as well as time stamps in a narrow vertical column that can be configured to … Read more