LyteByte

Feeds are the life stream of this new Web 2.0 era and making it easily accessible is the basic idea between all the feed readers. One third of Lyte Byte’s readers use Google reader which is also my personal favorite. It provides features though it does not provide great design (See how you can give a face lift to your Google Reader). Bloglines also has a big market share in the feed readers.

If you are using Vista and if you would like to see your feeds in the Vista Sidebar then these are the gadgets you should be using. These gadgets help you to view feeds from Google Reader, Bloglines and your custom feeds.

Google Reader:

Al’s RSS News is the gadget which gets the News and headlines from the Google Reader and presents it in Vista Sidebar. It’s a very good one especially if you don’t view Google Reader in the conventional browser quite often. The only issue with this Gadget is that you have to double click the scroll bar to activate it so that you can scroll through the feeds.

Bloglines:

Recently I did mention that Code Project held a competition for Vista Gadgets and its winner gadgets. This Bloglines Sidebar gadget is one of the contributions. This Gadget is fully synced with bloglines feeds and settings. The feeds are categorized and the contents are fully readable as it is shown as an extension to the regular sidebar. This feed totally avoids the need to sign in through a conventional browser.

The best of all the source code is also provided so if you think if can work around with some of the features then you can surely play around.

Personal Feed Viewer:

If you don’t want to read all the feeds in the sidebar and if you would like to track of only few feeds then you can use Personal Feed Viewer. This allows you to add feed links and they are shown in the sidebar. This is good for content only feeds as it has some problem with showing pictures clearly.

Feed Notification in GTalk:
If you are a regular user of GTalk and Check out ‘How to Receive alerts when a Feed is updated in Google Talk?’