Recently, one of my good friends has recently just obtained a new job where he gets to actually USE technology (he was in a very traditional sector before) ... I hinted that he might want to read RSS feeds so he can quickly read what's going on in the industries he is working in as information about new products, services, etc... is released. He didn't know anything about RSS, so I sent him to Wikipedia (which is always so slow!) to read more about it (Atom/RSS/OPML, etc...). Having done that, I recommended that he download Omea Reader, since I work for the company that makes it, so I could help him learn it quickly since I use Omea Pro on a daily basis, not to mention it's free. However, we quickly ran into a problem ... he needed to install the .NET Framework in order to use Omea Reader, and he did NOT have permission to install anything like that on his computer. He would have to put in a request to the admin to do it. What a bugger! But, this presents a problem which I'm sure he's not the only one to have run that course. What to do?
Well, get a browser based RSS reader of course! I then recommended Bloglines (although I personally don't have any experience with it, as I use a rich client) ... but then somebody else told me about Pluck. I haven't had a chance to crash test the two, but Pluck is pretty impressive, easy to use (a plus for novices), and free (at least for now). Plus, they have something cool called Shadows (I won't discuss that, since I don't know enough about it yet, but basicaly you can create your own personalized search engine ... more about it later when I play with it.) integrated into it.
Whatever the case, web based RSS clients are pretty useful, but if you wanna read off-line, there will be a need for rich clients, too, with off-line functionality. I guess it just depends what you need.
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