Tabbloid Turns Feeds Into a Personal Magazine
This is a good idea, though for many of us it’s probably too late as we’ve become used to our RSS feed readers (I personally use Google). However, it’s a nice idea that will undoubtedly gain traction amongst the less technical savvy or those into personalization of everything.
The idea behind tabbloid is to create a personalized “magazine” out of your favorite feeds. Taking those feeds and their headlines, it builds a magazine-styled layout of the stories and information, all neatly packed onto a simple web page. Sounds great. Right?
The problem here, besides the somewhat limited appeal of this site, is its functionality. I set up a tabbloid with six RSS feeds that work just fine in both Google and Outlook and found that, of the six, two wouldn’t come up at all and one (an Atom feed from Blogger.com) looked completely lousy. The other three, which are standard XML from large, well-known sites, looked great, though.
As a way to compile headlines from main stream news sources and magazines, tabbloid might be a fine choice to compile your daily reads into one, easily understood format for quick browsing. I found it to be fairly useless for my feed-reading needs, but a friend of mine who’s in marketing thinks it’s great. So I guess it’s a matter of perspective and need.
It’s free, so you have little to lose giving tabbloid a shot.
