Community news voting site Digg.com surprised some in the tech community recently when its small team announced it would build an RSS feed reader. The brand-new Digg Reader is now in open beta (digg.com/reader), just days before Google erects a tombstone for Google Reader.
I got early access to the beta and had a few days to test it out. In use, Digg Reader hit nearly every requirement for being a great Google Reader replacement. In its signup process, though, the new Web-based tool left a few crucial checkboxes blank.
I like that Digg Reader will have dedicated mobile apps (an iPhone and iPad version are fresh on the market, too), and I'm curious to see what features will be unveiled in coming months as Digg takes its RSS reader from free to freemium, asking users to pay for extra services.
The product is technically in beta, so while I will call attention in this review to a few instances of buggy functionality, those problems did not affect my overall scoring of the product.
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Sign Up and Feed Importing
Unfortunately, there's no option to sign up for a Digg Reader with a simple email address and password. The site prompts you to connect to a Google account, which I did but wasn't thrilled to do. I prefer unique logins.
Automatically signing into Google, however, let Digg Reader import my Google Reader feeds without me having to do anything at all, which is just how Feedly handles importing. The transfer happened quickly, and I had all my feeds in the new Web-based Digg Reader within a minute or two. The time it takes to get your feeds into Digg Reader will vary depending on how many you have set up in Google Reader, so expect a longer wait if you have hundreds or thousands of feeds.
I didn't see any options for importing OPML files, which is a huge black mark in my book. If the only way to import feeds is to connect to Google directly, Digg Reader won't be a very appealing service to people who use other services, or to anyone who waits until after July 1 to sign up and can't import their data from Google Takeout (see these instructions for how to get your Google Takeout data and import it into a new RSS feed reading service).
Design and Features
In basic layout, Digg Reader closely resembles Feedly, The Old Reader, SwarmIQ, Feedspot, and plenty of other Web-based RSS feed readers. Your feeds appear on the left rail, in collapsible/expandable folders if you've organized them by some schema. The center part of the screen displays a list of feed items, either expanded so you can see the full post or collapsed to just provide a list of headlines. Settings are tucked away under a button from the top menu bar, as are a few other features. All the Digg Reader exclusive features, of which there aren't that many, reside at the top of that left rail, above all your feeds. More on those in a moment.
G2Reader is the only free RSS feed reader I've seen that follows the same layout as all the others but adds little bits of color to give it a unique identity. If you're looking for a reader with a lot more visual pizzaz, try Taptu.
Each feed or folder with unread content has a number next to it indicating how many items you have yet to open, and in testing the early beta, I found the numbers didn't always reflect what was shown in the main part of the screen. Let's chalk that up to beta bugs.
All your Google Reader feeds will appear in that left rail, and an "Add" button at the bottom lets you save more RSS feeds to your list. You can add a feed of your choosing by pasting into a text field when prompted, or you can explore suggested content based on categories such as art, books, business, long reads, music, news, politics, science, technology, and many others.
Digg Reader's Unique Features
Digg Reader's few unique features will seem familiar to Digg users. You can opt to view what's popular by clicking on the "Popular" listing in the left rail, which shows items that are popular. "Popular" appears to mean "popular from among your feeds," rather than popular among all Digg Reader users. For example, one popular post that turned up in my list came from the FiveThirtyEight blog, which I signed up to receive from among the suggested listings. That entry had one red dot next to it, although Digg Reader never told me what those dots mean. I'm guessing they indicate level of popularity, seeing as a few other items in my popular list had two or even three red dots. The more dots, the higher the item appeared in the popular list.
Digg Reader lets you "save" items by clicking a bookmark icon next to them, and they'll appear any time you click on the "Saved" button in the left rail. Or you can "Digg" any item, and afterward it will appear when you click on a "Diggs" button. Once again, I found little in the way of explanation regarding these two features—some overlaid info or tutorials might have been helpful—and my hunch about the difference between Digging and saving is that Digging an item is the same as publicly liking it or voting it up, whereas saving is private. But who can say for sure?
One minor feature that I appreciate is that you can have "loose" feeds, that is, feeds that are not nested in any folder. Just about every other RSS feed reader I have tried puts all feeds into some folder, even if it's just called "Uncategorized" or "Subscriptions." But I really like the option to have feeds not categorized and floating above all my other folders where they are more visible.
You can also drag and drop loose feeds and folders to change their order on a whim. G2Reader sorts all your folders alphabetically, and you can't change the order of them or the content inside them, which is a little frustrating. The Old Reader lets you change the order of folders and feeds inside them, but mandates that all feeds stay inside a folder. Feedly lets you change the order of folders, but not the feeds inside them, which sort alphabetically. Digg Reader definitely gives you good control in this area.
Integration With Other Services
Digg Reader requires a Google account, as I mentioned, but you can also hook it to Facebook and Twitter for the purpose of sharing any item from your feed to those social networks.
Some RSS fans will be thrilled to hear that Digg Reader also integrates with Pocket, Readability, and Instapaper, all services that make it easier to read long-form content in particular when offline.
Public vs. Private
When I explored Digg Reader's settings, I found a few instances of switches set to "public" rather than "private" by default, which pleased me none too much. Here's where I discovered a little more detail about Digging versus saving. There are two private/public switches for URLs that contain a feed of all the items from your account that you either save or Digg. Ah ha. So, if you set these URLs to public, you can then let other RSS feed users get a stream of all the content you either Digg or save. That's kind of neat, but I wish there had been some explanation so I could determine whether and how I might use those capabilities—or whether I'd prefer to toggle them to private.
Will You Digg It?
Despite a few early beta bugs, Digg Reader looks promising. It's definitely a viable replacement to Google Reader, as long as you sign up soon and don't mind that it necessarily connects to your Google account. Dedicated Digg Reader apps for iPhone and iPad add another layer of appeal, too. But if you are not willing to use an RSS feed reading service that demands a connection to Google, pick G2Reader, one of our Editors' Choices. The other is Feedly, which also requires a Google account, and seems very similar to Digg Reader in many ways but has more time and thus stability and assurance behind it. That head-to-head comparison could change in the coming months, though, when Digg Reader rolls out its premium services. Stay tuned.
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